with Alexandra Ellerbeck
Delta is responsible for a growing number of coronavirus cases in the United States.
“The highly transmissible coronavirus variant called delta is present in all 50 states and is expected to become dominant in most parts of the United States in coming weeks,” our colleagues Lindsey Bever and Joel Achenbach write.
“Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky recently said that an estimated 25 percent of new infections in the country have been linked to the variant, and it accounts for nearly one in two sequenced cases in some communities,” they add.
Cases nationwide are appearing to rise somewhat — likely due to the rapid spread of delta — but deaths aren't likely to see a concurrent rise as in the past (although hospitalizations might go up somewhat).
“We're not going to see the same link between cases and deaths that we've seen before vaccinations, because our vaccination rates, thankfully, among older people, the high-risk people, is just really phenomenal,” Ashish Jha, dean of the School of Public Health at Brown University, told me during a Washington Post Live interview yesterday. “Most high-risk people have been fully vaccinated. And so those people are going to be protected.”
Indeed, there’s strong and mounting evidence that the most-used vaccines are highly effective against delta.
Some good news — and some potentially less-good news — came from a study out of Israel, whose Health Ministry found the Pfizer vaccine was highly successful at preventing severe illness and death after a delta variant infection. The study did prompt some concerns, however, as researchers found it had a lower overall effectiveness of 64 percent after two doses.
Yet that’s just one study. White House press secretary Jen Psaki shrugged off concerns about delta and vaccine effectiveness on Monday, calling the Israeli research “preliminary.”
“The vast majority of data from larger assessments and larger studies shows that it is quite effective,” Psaki told reporters.
One such study is from a team in Ontario, Canada, which found that the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are just as effective against delta on all three measures: infections, hospitalizations and deaths.
The study hasn’t yet been peer-reviewed, but Jeff Kwong, one of its authors, said he was happy to find persistent effectiveness against the variant. The Pfizer vaccine was 87 percent effective after two shots, and 56 percent effective after just one shot.
“I was pleasantly surprised,” Kwong told me.
And in another study released in May, British researchers found that two doses of the Pfizer vaccine were 88 percent effective against symptomatic illness caused by the variant.
So the vaccinated don’t have much to worry about.
“If you’re vaccinated, you’re protected,” President Biden said on Monday. “But if you’re unvaccinated, you’re not.”
Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said recently he’s “very concerned” about the variant because it could lead to “two Americas” in which those in areas with high vaccination rates are safer than those in areas with low vaccination rates.
Nearly every recent covid-19 death has been among unvaccinated people. In Maryland, unvaccinated people made up all of the state’s reported coronavirus deaths in June, along with the vast majority of new cases and hospitalizations.
And places with high vaccination rates are getting close to zero coronavirus fatalities. Illinois reported no deaths on Monday — although that was probably due to delays in reporting over the holiday weekend. Yet the state’s daily deaths are now typically in the single digits or teens. Arizona, New Jersey and several other states also reported no deaths on Monday.
But delta is free to spread like wildfire in unvaccinated areas of the U.S. and in much of the world.
The United States is among only a few large countries where a substantial portion of citizens are vaccinated, lagging behind just Israel and the United Kingdom for vaccinations per capita.
In the rest of the world, vaccination rates are well below 50 percent, and in some cases are hovering in the single digits. India has given at least one dose to 21 percent of residents. In Russia, it’s 18.1 percent. In Indonesia, it’s 12.3 percent.
That means fertile ground for delta, which is about 50 percent more contagious than the alpha variant, first identified last fall in the United Kingdom. And while deaths have dramatically receded in the United States, that’s not the reality globally, with death rates hovering around levels last seen in November 2020.
Ahh, oof and ouch
AHH: Biden is reinvigorating the push for health-care and education priorities.
Biden promoted his vision to invest in child care, health care and education during a speech at McHenry County College in Crystal Lake, Ill. The speech comes in the wake of an agreement on a bipartisan infrastructure framework, which has left out key Democratic priorities, including $400 million in long-term care that formed a key part of Biden’s initial infrastructure proposal.
“I’m here to make the case for the second critical part of my domestic agenda,” Biden told the crowd. “It’s a combination of parts of my American Jobs Plan that were essential and not included in the bipartisan infrastructure plan, as well as my American Families Plan.”
Biden’s American Families Plan included the creation of a paid family and medical leave program, in addition to priorities regarding education and child tax credits. Some Democrats have said that their support for the bipartisan bill is contingent on the passage of a reconciliation bill that includes these and other priorities.
“White House officials signaled that Biden’s trip was an effort to allay concerns that the administration was too focused on the bipartisan agreement instead of the transformational changes he and other Democrats vowed to enact if given control of the White House and Congress,” The Post’s Cleve R. Wootsen Jr. reports.
OOF: Information is sparse in the search for patient zero.
“In the search for the pandemic’s origin, the trail officially ends with Patient S01, China’s first confirmed covid-19 case, whose sparse details were outlined in the joint WHO-China report released in March,” The Post reports. “He was not a seafood vendor, bat hunter or lab scientist. He was an accountant surnamed Chen who shopped at a very large supermarket.”
But even for S01, the details are hazy. The World Health Organization says S01 fell ill on Dec. 8. But the WHO report lists a sample ID sequence for him that appears to belong to a different patient. Meanwhile, the patient whose details best match is listed in an official Chinese database as falling ill on Dec. 16.
“That so little is confirmed is unsatisfying, but not necessarily surprising. Despite intense desire to understand the pandemic’s source, it often takes years for scientists to establish the provenance and early infection path of a new disease. And China’s government hasn’t made it easier, limiting access to biological samples and original records, even to the WHO,” our colleagues Eva Dou, Lyric Li, Chico Harlan and Rick Noack write.
Other clues complicate the picture further. Several studies have identified coronavirus antibodies in a handful of blood samples drawn in Europe before the first known case in China. But antibody tests can show false positives, and some scientists doubt the findings. And while China has suggested the virus was brought to Wuhan from abroad, that theory has gained little support from scientists in other countries who point to the genetic similarities between SARS-CoV-2 and known bat coronaviruses from China’s south.
OUCH: A Chinese gene testing company is amassing data from millions of pregnant women.
The vast bank of genomic data amassed by BGI and the company’s collaboration with the Chinese military have raised concerns among U.S. government advisers. At least 8 million women around the world have taken BGI’s prenatal tests, which are branded NIFTY for “Non-Invasive Fetal TrisomY” and can detect abnormalities such as Down syndrome in the fetus.
“The tests are a private procedure for the women who take them, a component in their routine prenatal care. But the studies show that they yield increasingly potent information for research,” Reuters reports.
DNA data from prenatal tests on women outside China have been stored in China’s government-funded gene database. Reuters found that BGI also has closer ties to the Chinese military than previously reported. The company has published at least a dozen joint studies on the tests with the People’s Liberation Army since 2010.
“One BGI study, for instance, used a military supercomputer to re-analyze NIFTY data and map the prevalence of viruses in Chinese women, look for indicators of mental illness in them, and single out Tibetan and Uyghur minorities to find links between their genes and their characteristics,” Reuters’s Kirsty Needham and Clare Baldwin report.
BGI has said that it does not have access to identifiable personal data in its research project and that it has not provided data from NIFTY tests to Chinese authorities for national security or defense purposes.
More in coronavirus news
Some covid deaths in prison were not included in official facility counts.
More than 2,700 people are reported to have died of covid-19 in connection to U.S. prisons, jails and immigration detention centers. But the count could be far higher because some hospitalized inmates were officially released from custody before they died, the New York Times reports.
“In some cases, in places including Texas, Ohio and California, deaths were added to facilities’ virus tolls after The Times brought missing names to the attention of officials. In other cases, people who were infected with the coronavirus while incarcerated — but granted legal releases because of the severity of their illnesses — were not included in the death tallies of the jails where they got sick. Still other inmates’ deaths were left off facilities’ virus tolls for reasons that are unexplained,” the New York Times’s Maura Turcotte, Rachel Sherman, Rebecca Griesbach and Ann Hinga Klein report.
Three public health experts are reflecting on what we got wrong about the coronavirus pandemic.
In an interview for Persuasion, Emily Yoffe spoke with Monica Gandhi, a professor of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco School of Medicine with expertise in infectious diseases; Vinay Prasad, an associate professor in the epidemiology and biostatistics department at the University of California at San Francisco; and Stefan Baral, an associate professor in the epidemiology department at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Some key takeaways:
- All three physicians argue that it’s time for the United States to accept that it won’t eliminate covid-19. Instead of focusing on the number of infections, the focus should be on serious health outcomes, including hospitalizations and deaths, they said.
- They warned that decisions about school closures got caught up in politics. “I hate to say it, but the moment Donald Trump said he was for schools reopening, I think a lot of people turned their brains off, and they opposed it totally to thwart him,” Prasad said.
- They also argued that the pandemic exacerbated inequalities between the wealthy and the working class. Baral made the case that the uniform pandemic response failed to take into account different levels of risk. “[A] lot of the workplaces declared ‘essential’ continued, and we didn’t provide those people options in terms of their households. For example, we could have made temporary living spaces available, especially for people in multi-generational households,” he said.
