I dunno, it’s not so clear to me that we should expect “fourth wave in the US” as opposed to “fourth wave in one or two cities of the US”. Think of how it took 12 months to get from Wuhan to where we are today … I don’t think that’s all isolation fatigue, I think it’s partly that region-to-region spread takes a while. Trevor Bedford offered the mental picture: Wuhan was a spark in November, and 10 weeks later it was a big enough fire to throw off sparks that started fires in Italy, NYC, etc., then 10 weeks later those fires were big enough to throw off sparks to other cities etc., and many rural areas were finally getting their first outbreaks in the most recent couple months. Maybe something like, “R0>1 only because of a small number of unusually infectious people (either due to quirks of biology or behavior / situation), so it’s likelier than you would think for a contageon to never start in a particular place, or to fizzle out immediately by chance”. Then maybe it takes until late summer for the new strain to really get going in most places, by which time you have vaccines and weather / sunlight mitigating it.
...But maybe NYC and Boston are first in line again. Strong travel connections to England...? :-/
I dunno, I could see it going either way, behaviors (especially travel levels) are different now than last year, as are immunity levels.
Low confidence, I haven’t thought too hard about it.
I dunno, it’s not so clear to me that we should expect “fourth wave in the US” as opposed to “fourth wave in one or two cities of the US”. Think of how it took 12 months to get from Wuhan to where we are today … I don’t think that’s all isolation fatigue, I think it’s partly that region-to-region spread takes a while. Trevor Bedford offered the mental picture: Wuhan was a spark in November, and 10 weeks later it was a big enough fire to throw off sparks that started fires in Italy, NYC, etc., then 10 weeks later those fires were big enough to throw off sparks to other cities etc., and many rural areas were finally getting their first outbreaks in the most recent couple months. Maybe something like, “R0>1 only because of a small number of unusually infectious people (either due to quirks of biology or behavior / situation), so it’s likelier than you would think for a contageon to never start in a particular place, or to fizzle out immediately by chance”. Then maybe it takes until late summer for the new strain to really get going in most places, by which time you have vaccines and weather / sunlight mitigating it.
...But maybe NYC and Boston are first in line again. Strong travel connections to England...? :-/
I dunno, I could see it going either way, behaviors (especially travel levels) are different now than last year, as are immunity levels.
Low confidence, I haven’t thought too hard about it.