A "New Strain" Of COVID?

At right is the latest table showing LA County COVID case mortality rates from the county health department site. Click on the image for a larger copy.

One story that's come out over the slow holiday news cycle is Boris Johnson's extension of Tier 4 lockdowns in the UK and the French closing their border with the UK due to some sort of "new" COVID strain.

British officials have now estimated that “VUI – 202012/01” is as much as 70 percent more transmissible — a number that is based on modeling, but not yet confirmed in lab experiments. A later study, published on December 23, suggested a smaller, but still dangerous number: that the British mutation is 53 percent more contagious.

Though there is no evidence to-date that the strain causes a more intense illness or leads to a higher fatality rate, faster transmission does mean more cases, which can lead to a higher hospitalization rate.

Where is Peter Sellers when we need him? Only he could properly portray a UK Dr Fauci explaining how the new strain is 70% -- or maybe 53% -- more contagious than the old one, except nobody gets any sicker. I don't see how what's supposedly happening in the UK differs from what we see in the LA County data -- more and more people testing "positive" and creating "cases" (some large proportion of which are apparently asymptomatic), with a steadily decreasing percentage of deaths.

But note as well that, although "cases" have been spiking, the dark line at the very bottom of the graph, cumulative deaths, hasn't spiked at all.

I've been following this data all this month, and the county has been slow to add the downward tick in the black line on the right. It indicates a halving of the case mortality rate since the fall, implying that it's now at 1%, but the numbers have actually been running consistently under 1%. On December 23, the last day before holiday distortions, there were 16,525 new cases and 145 new deaths, giving a case mortality rate of .8 of 1%. We have to grant that "case" is a meaningless concept, since so many are likely to be false positives or asymptomatic, while deaths include thsoe from any cause that can remotely be attributed to COVID, but the bottom line is that by even the measures most favorable to the moral entrepreneurs, the mortality is declining -- and has been since the spring.

Meantime, a frenzy of testing has spiked case numbers. Again, even if these numbers can be used to incite continued panic, the most favorable interpretation for the entrepreneurs is that the disease is somehow more contagious, but it's less fatal. But this could be nothing more than a result of more testing that's showing what the spread has alwsys been in the population.

But a "new strain" can certainly be used to explain LA County data, halfway around the world from the UK. Dr Fauci has said we shouldn't overreact and ban flights from the UK,, but that's just Dr Fauci for now. Once the entrepreneurs get the idea the "new strain" has hit LA, he'll flip flop like he always does.

He'll make it sound like he was right all along and did us a big favor by not pointing it out.