Delta: Danger is Rising, but 2021 is not 2020

Covid cases are rising rapidly in the US thanks to the more contagious delta variant.

Based on the experience of 2020, this has many states, cities, and organizations considering a return to mask mandates and shutdowns. But our situation in the US has changed substantially since 2020 as we now have better knowledge, better masks, and above all abundant vaccines.

We can see this difference clearly when looking at countries hit by the Delta wave before us. It first devastated India, where less than 10% of the population was fully vaccinated, officially killing 400,000 people and unofficially perhaps 10 times that. In constrast the UK, where more than half the population was fully vaccinated, saw a major spike in cases that did not translate into a major spike in deaths:

The delta waves seem to come and go quickly, with cases rising more rapidly than previous waves, but also falling rapidly 6-8 weeks after they began to rise in India, the UK, and the Netherlands. Cases began rising in the US at the beginning of July, so if this pattern holds we have about 2-4 more weeks of rising cases before a rapid drop.

My worry is that a spike in cases just before the school year will lead schools to shut down just as the danger begins to recede, and when vaccines mean the danger was never as great as in previous waves. Externality-based arguments for shutdowns and mask mandates are now substantially less valid than in 2020 but I don’t know that policymakers have internalized this. The Biden admin actually does seem to get it, calling this a “pandemic of the unvaccinated“- i.e., if you’re worried, get vaccinated, and if other people don’t, that’s their problem. Even with delta the vaccines reduce covid’s danger to you by ~10x, and so also reduce the protection you gain from controlling others by ~10x.

The situation with masks has also changed. Cloth masks have limited effectiveness in protecting you from others, but decent effectiveness in protecting others from you, which meant there was a strong externality-based case for mask mandates. But now in 2021 high-quality KN-95 and even N-95 masks are easily available, and unlike cloth masks they offer excellent protection FROM others, as well as FOR others. Anyone who is vaccinated and wearing an N-95 really has nothing to worry about anymore, and little reason to force masks onto others.

The main externality-based arguments that could still work are for vaccine mandates and for restrictions in areas where hospitals are overwhelmed by unvaccinated Covid patients in a way that substantially worsens care for non-Covid patients. But outside of areas with low vaccination rates leading to overwhelmed hospitals, I no longer see a good case to impose mask requirements or restrictions on movement or events.

According to one set of projections, by the end of August adult ICUs (though not hospitals overall) will be over capacity in most low-vaccination states:

If you want to wear a mask and avoid crowds, you can, and in fact probably should do at least one of those during the Delta wave of the next month. But the externality-based case for restrictions is mostly gone, and governments would do better to focus on continuing vaccine rollout in the US and ensuring vaccines are available worldwide to help other countries and to prevent more variants from emerging and finding their way here. Personally I’m glad that my employer has a vaccine mandate but, at least currently, no mask mandate. For those who do still want Covid restrictions I ask- what are you waiting for? What event or number would make you say “ok, now we can go back to normal”? When do you expect that to happen? For me, what I was waiting for was vaccines available for everyone and now, at least in the US, we are lucky to have that.