This was originally a Facebook post of mine from 2020-12-24, and is archived here as a curiosity. Minor changes to formatting, as well as basic copy-edits, may have been made in the transition from Facebook post to web format.
There is a new strain of coronavirus that has mostly taken over as the main coronavirus strain in England.
The evidence available so far suggests that the week-to-week multiplier for this new virus is approximately double that of regular coronavirus.
The new strain is also most likely in the United States already.
If this is true, it is entirely possible that the number of cases per day will show a sudden and massive spike either in February, March, or April.
If the new strain really does have a week-to-week multiplier double that of regular coronavirus, it is hard to run the numbers in any way that suggests we can vaccinate most Americans before it hits us hard, and it's hard to imagine the political will existing to stop something that multiplies that fast through non-vaccine means, when we didn't even manage to contain regular coronavirus.
This is based on rough calculations I've been doing, and I'm not an expert, so I could be incredibly wrong.
I hope I'm wrong.
The media is currently not nearly as concerned about this new strain as I am. But then again, back in February the media was not very concerned about the original coronavirus coming out, and I bought toilet paper that I'm still using before toilet paper was running out anywhere in the United States. So I was ahead on that one.
They vastly underestimated where things were going because journalists can't do math, with very rare exceptions.
The number of deaths will depend on how many old people we can get vaccinated before it hits us hard, if it hits us hard. It might not hit us hard, because everything about this covid outbreak so far seems surprising.
I will wait and watch what happens week by week. I'm not quitting my job, or running off to the woods, or anything like that, and I'm not telling you to do anything in particular.
But that's what I'm thinking right now. It looks to me like the UK thing is pretty serious, and I haven't yet seen any reason not to think it's pretty serious. Hopefully I will find some reason that it's not serious. But I'm not seeing it yet.
The writing on this page is released under the CC0 1.0 license.