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I totally understand the worry, but I& #39;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& #39;s a football analogy, because I know @andrew_croxford likes those. https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1383103434283491336">https://twitter.com/jburnmurd...
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& #39;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& #39;t just buy Manchester City standard players. I& #39;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& #39;s not going to come cheap, I& #39;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& #39;s going to have a similar advantage (so R0 of 6.75?) or it& #39;s going to have to perform significantly better against vaccines.
I& #39;m yet to see convincing evidence either of those is true - though it is possible. Heart-breakingly terrible though the Indian situation is, I& #39;m not seeing evidence of those kind of R numbers there. And vaccine experts don& #39;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& #39;ll get sustained exponential growth is by community spread. So that& #39;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& #39;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?
