Reasoning: The US is about 4 times larger than the UK. The UK has more vaccinations than the US, and, most importantly, fewer low-vaccination regions where cases among the vaccinated might truly skyrocket. The UK has nearly 50,000 daily cases already, and that’s before reopening (and there are regions in the US with fewer restrictions presently). (And the UK will probably hit 200,000 cases and beyond.) The US is behind in the Delta variant timeline, but even a best-case scenario would get over 100,000 cases. Everything else would look like a miracle, especially given (very justified) restriction fatigue.
That’s the only argument in your list that I find interesting. However, there’s not enough time to vaccinate enough children to curb the spread sufficiently. Also, I doubt most states are doing this. Maybe they’re just vaccinating children with comorbidities?
One thing going against that is that the UK has focused on single-shot vaccination while the US has had much more double-shot vaccination, which seems to have an impact on the delta variant.
That’s a good point. However, last time I checked, the UK was slightly ahead even on only counting the percentage of doubly-vaccinated people. (Also, it’s possible that single-vaccinated people are substantially less infectious conditional on getting infected, which means that the UK strategy of focusing on first doses could actually be superior. I don’t know if this applies, but it’s not obviously wrong to me.)
You could also point out that UK had more Astra Zeneca vaccinations, which are a bit less effective. That’s true but it just seems intuitively extremely implausible that the effect would be large enough. 100k cases is too low of a bar to make this question interesting. It would be somewhat interesting for 200k cases.
Reasoning: The US is about 4 times larger than the UK. The UK has more vaccinations than the US, and, most importantly, fewer low-vaccination regions where cases among the vaccinated might truly skyrocket. The UK has nearly 50,000 daily cases already, and that’s before reopening (and there are regions in the US with fewer restrictions presently). (And the UK will probably hit 200,000 cases and beyond.) The US is behind in the Delta variant timeline, but even a best-case scenario would get over 100,000 cases. Everything else would look like a miracle, especially given (very justified) restriction fatigue.
That’s the only argument in your list that I find interesting. However, there’s not enough time to vaccinate enough children to curb the spread sufficiently. Also, I doubt most states are doing this. Maybe they’re just vaccinating children with comorbidities?
One thing going against that is that the UK has focused on single-shot vaccination while the US has had much more double-shot vaccination, which seems to have an impact on the delta variant.
That’s a good point. However, last time I checked, the UK was slightly ahead even on only counting the percentage of doubly-vaccinated people. (Also, it’s possible that single-vaccinated people are substantially less infectious conditional on getting infected, which means that the UK strategy of focusing on first doses could actually be superior. I don’t know if this applies, but it’s not obviously wrong to me.)
You could also point out that UK had more Astra Zeneca vaccinations, which are a bit less effective. That’s true but it just seems intuitively extremely implausible that the effect would be large enough. 100k cases is too low of a bar to make this question interesting. It would be somewhat interesting for 200k cases.