Is the US data not relevant to us?

[crypticandsober]

I just saw on another thread that the UK is viewed as a kind of Petri dish for seeing what happens when you have a high level of vaccines, increasing daily rates and restrictions are lifted.

The US has had much fewer restrictions in most states for ages and now seem mostly to be relying on vaccination with restrictions lifted. Their vaccination rate is similar to the UK. Delta is there in very state.

According to John Hopkins, the 7 day average case rate in the US Is now circa 20k per day vs 250k in January.

What am I missing about why it will be very different in the uk?

I think the main difference is that Delta has only recently started to take hold in the states.

The US is not using AstraZeneca. The US is in the early stages of Delta spread. The US has higher underlying natural immunity than the U.K.

Cases per 100k are about 10k in the US at the moment and their vaccination programme is very strong; they are only seeing around 250 deaths per day (from 330 million people) - about 0.08 per 100,000 people.

So yes, similar to the UK in that the vaccination programme is very strong, restrictions are lifting, cases are high, and thanks to that vaccination programme deaths are very low.

Why does the US have higher underlying natural immunity than the UK? Where is that data from?

Hmm, yes. I guess the degree of delta variant is less there (though not for long presumably) and they do have different vaccines.

Still will be interesting to see what happens given their restriction easing happened a lot sooner.

I think another difference is many states haven’t been in and out of lockdowns (Florida). So they haven’t had that massive uptick when coming out of lockdown. Peaks and troughs yes. I wonder if this will help the delta variant not spread as much. More natural immunity from other variants by letting cases bubble away at a lower level.

It is a good comparison

Vaccination rates in USA are much lower than vacc rates in England (~50% of eligible had at least one dose, vs. > 80% of eligible persons in England have had at least one dose)

They don't have a vacc booster programme planned

they opened up much faster and apart from mass school closures, had lighter lockdown rules at all times than UK; they didn't ban private socialising in own home, for instance

the US is vaccinating children! that makes a huge difference to transmission.

-and to case numbers, since we are mass testing our unvaccinated under-18s - this will produce very high case numbers, mostly in a population at no risk from Covid.
Yet we lock them up for 10 days at a time just for being in a year-group with a positive case.

Vaccination rates apparently vary across the US. Some states have higher rates than the UK.
Plus they only leave 3 weeks between the doses, so getting people fully vaccinated happens much quicker there, while we have a lot of people stuck on 32% protection with 1 dose.

covidvax.live/location/usa

The vaccination rates look very varriable across the states and I think the restrictions across states have varried massively but most places don't look as good as UK rates of vaccination.

Though overall they are at 47.72% fully vaccinated and 55.28% half done and we are 50.30% with 67.21% having had first dose.

www.wsj.com/articles/the-power-of-natural-immunity-11623171303
Some 80% to 85% of American adults are immune to the virus: More than 64% have received at least one vaccine dose and, of those who haven’t, roughly half have natural immunity from prior infection.

Though it is varying a lot between states so imagine immunity must as well and that's higher than covidvax has them for first doses.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-57748101

An estimated nine in 10 adults, or 91.8% of the adult population in Wales have antibodies

...

The proportion of the population covered sees Wales ahead of the other UK nations - with 89.8% covered in England, 87.2% in Northern Ireland and 84.7% in Scotland.

I don't think the immunity in UK is worse based on these figures.

So I assume it's a more mixed picture with more variation given size of population and country and possible different distribution of delta may also be playing a role.