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I totally understand the worry, but I'm not currently convinced the Indian variant will continue to grow in the UK like B117 did, the way the RH graph implies it might. I think there's a football analogy, because I know @andrew_croxford likes those. https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1383103434283491336
The reason B117 had its meteoric rise in the UK in November and December was that it only had to outcompete old style COVID. But the Indian variant can't just do that, it has to outcompete B117 as well.
Think about the Manchester City takeover. By spending a billion or so, they were able to monopolise English trophies. But now imagine I want to make Villa monopolise trophies in the same way, while Manchester City keep playing the financial game the way they do.
I couldn't just buy Manchester City standard players. I'd have to assemble a real World Super-XI. Mbappe and Haaland up front, van Dijk and Mings in defence, all the rest of it. That's not going to come cheap, I'm probably going to have to spend two or three times as much as them
If you put percentages of a strain on a logistic plot, you will see a straight line, and the slope tells you competitive advantage of a variant (against existing strains). B117 went up like it did because it had a 50% or so advantage. Say old COVID was R0 of 3, this is R0 of 4.5.
So if the Indian variant is going to go up the same way B117 did, I think one of two things is going to have to happen: either it's going to have a similar advantage (so R0 of 6.75?) or it's going to have to perform significantly better against vaccines.
I'm yet to see convincing evidence either of those is true - though it is possible. Heart-breakingly terrible though the Indian situation is, I'm not seeing evidence of those kind of R numbers there. And vaccine experts don't seem to be panicking yet, but keep listening to them.
The early stages of these graphs can be very deceptive. Think pre-season friendlies. Sure, detected Indian variant cases doubled in a week, but is it going to double the next ten weeks? You could look at early stages of the South African curve and make similar dire predictions.
I think a lot of the recent increase is due to cases being picked up at the border, but the number of incoming cases is linearly bounded, the only way you'll get sustained exponential growth is by community spread. So that's the other thing we need to be watching.
I totally get why everyone is jumpy, but I think it comes from a recency bias ("it all went wrong last time, so it's likely to happen again"), but I do actually wonder whether in this case the fact it went wrong before makes it less likely to happen again?
