Medical Mythbusting Commentary for December 29, 2020
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Why a SARS-CoV-2 variant that's 50% more transmissible would in general be a much bigger problem than a variant that's 50% more deadly. A short thread… 1/
— Adam Kucharski (@AdamJKucharski) December 28, 2020
As an example, suppose current R=1.1, infection fatality risk is 0.8%, generation time is 6 days, and 10k people infected (plausible for many European cities recently). So we'd expect 10000 x 1.1^5 x 0.8% = 129 eventual new fatalities after a month of spread… 2/
— Adam Kucharski (@AdamJKucharski) December 28, 2020
Now suppose transmissibility increases by 50%. By above, we'd expect 10000 x (1.1 x 1.5)^5 x 0.8% = 978 eventual new fatalities after a month of spread. 4/
— Adam Kucharski (@AdamJKucharski) December 28, 2020
The above is just an illustrative example, but the key message: an increase in something that grows exponentially (i.e. transmission) can have far more effect than the same proportional increase in something that just scales an outcome (i.e. severity). 5/5
— Adam Kucharski (@AdamJKucharski) December 28, 2020
Related posts:
- Retrospective study finds that the flu vaccine has benefits against severe effects of COVID-19. How it does this remains unknown but if true, it will be fascinating and enlightening to figure out how our immune response works in this setting.
- Prepare for what is coming over the next two weeks. It is expected and not a reflection that staying at home is not working. This is the past two weeks now percolating through to the present.
- PM Trudeau, your flouting of pandemic health policy rules demoralizes the country. Armchair “physicians”, stop flaunting cherry-picked preprint studies as “the” evidence HCQ works when there are just as many that refute it. That is why proper investigation and meta-analysis are required.
- Los Alamos Lab uses computational analysis of 6000 coronavirus sequences to conclude that a mutated strain is now dominant. Clinical implications remain unknown and study needs to be peer -reviewed and published.