#b117

While the the B.1.351 variant has yet to break 1%, there are two other variants currently on the rise in the US, with the important caveat that they are only on the rise in a relative sense. That is, covid

Some sobering math on what it takes to reach herd immunity with B.1.1.7, given that vaccines and infection aren't perfect preventers of future infection or transmission. With an R0 of 4.3, they're looking

I’m excited that America’s vaccination infrastructure appears to be winning the race with B117 & co, at least for now. At this point the majority of new US cases are from B117 and the other more infectious

I was pretty skeptical when the UK announced that they thought that the B.1.1.7 variant was more contagious. They did not have any data showing increased transmission rates. But now multiple countries

Almost 1 in 5 Americans are totally vaccinated, but cases have stopped falling everywhere and are starting to rise in many places. What gives? B.1.1.7. The British variant is becoming our dominant strain,

We aren't out of the woods yet in the US with the virus. Michigan is having a new wave even despite decent vaccination coverage of its elderly as the UK variant is dominant there (likely 80+% of the

I'm prepared to be wrong on Governor Abbott's ending of the state COVID restrictions. We still need to see what effect B.1.1.7 has, but so far, the March 2 end of the mask mandate and business restrictions

It is a little too early to call victory over the UK variant in the US. We will have to see how Florida fares in the next couple weeks now that the UK variant is likely dominant there. So far Florida looks

We're now at about 2.25%, and it appears to be spreading significantly faster than I expected base on the UK history. (It may be because it's not competing with the Spanish variant that was already widespread

We’ve produced our latest estimates for the level of #COVID19 infection rates across the UK pic.twitter.com/uyCKU11Wjv— Office for National Statistics (ONS) (@ONS) January 22, 2021 Really interesting

You may recall me writing two weeks ago about B.1.1.7 being in a race vs. our vaccination rate, and that we needed to get about 100 million people vaccinated by late March to stay ahead of the curve -

You may be hearing about a new US variant, sometimes called "The Columbus Variant", and some really sloppy science reporting. Here's the paper on it. Yes, there is a set of variants that have

Some informative and frankly beautiful charts on B.1.1.7 aka 20B.501Y.V1 spreading in the UK. (B.1.1.7 is a name from the ever-growing tree of known mutations, each major branch gets a new number. The

We've seen what B.1.1.7 does even when you're mostly locked down as it takes over. What happens if it takes over and you're not locked down? Let's check in on Ireland. 18 days ago, they were at 1/6 of

tl;dr - The rate of B.1.1.7 in the US was below 0.5% in late December, we don't know how much below. That means we likely have until April or later before B.1.1.7 becomes dominant and infections accelerate.

The Wed and Thu evening updates should be our first post-holiday normal read. tl;dr - it looks like we're still trending up a bit nationally. Case counts appear to be up a bit from mid December, and with

This post is going to be a bit scattered, there is so much going on that it's exceeded my bandwidth to stay on top of it all. First, I'll give some quick "here's my take" on a bunch of issues,

I don't feel the energy to do the long write-up right now, but I am nearly 100% convinced that the US should adopt the UK's strategy of getting 1 dose to as many people as possible before doing second

And Florida makes it 3, another case with no international travel. We have community spread confirmed in FL, CO and CA. At this point, 1000 active B.1.1.7 cases in the US is a lowball estimate; it's

This shows in orange where on the spike the B.1.1.7 mutations are, and in red, it shows the location of the top 10 natural antibodies after a COVID infection. None of the 10 overlap the mutations, so we