David Wallace-Wells writes:

At present, there are two big anchors to conventional-wisdom thinking on the Delta variant: that those already vaccinated remain exceedingly well protected against the new, more transmissible strain; and that those who aren’t remain exceedingly vulnerable.

But a third fact seems, to me, to be just as significant, in assessing the COVID risks the country faces going forward: that the age skew of the disease and the age skew of vaccine penetration, taken together, mean that the country as a whole has probably had at least 90 percent of its collective mortality risk eliminated through vaccines. Death isn’t the only outcome worth worrying about, of course — being hospitalized or even ventilated is no happy outcome for anyone, and the possibility of long COVID looms over each case (though precisely how prevalent that phenomenon is remains up for debate). But for most of the course of the pandemic, cases and deaths have guided our sense of the trajectory of the disease, and proceeded together almost in lockstep. Almost certainly that relationship has been severed by mass vaccination, since the overwhelming majority of the most at-risk are now very well-protected.

Indeed, both in the United States and in those similarly well-vaccinated countries whose delta waves precede ours, that is what we’ve seen. In the U.K., which has had, after India, perhaps the world’s most striking Delta wave, the infection fatality rate may have fallen as much as 20-fold from previous waves. And it appears possible, at least, that for all the public alarm about British re-opening in the midst of the Delta wave, that new case numbers may already have peaked and begun to decline. If this holds up, it is likely that the country’s seven-day rolling death total during the Delta wave will peak, a few weeks from now, below 100. In January, it was over a thousand. [Continue reading…]