According to this German article, the Robert Koch institute estimates that 85% of the population needs to be doubly vaccinated to guarantee herd immunity to the Delta variant. This is borderline unachievable. (Edit: I think they actually mean 12+ year olds, instead of the full population. Even so.)
Without that level of vaccination, you cannot open up too much, or you’ll have a slowly growing surge of cases that won’t go away until herd immunity is reached naturally. This means case counts being >1% (and >>1%) for many weeks or even months, as is happening now in the UK.
Deaths may not reach the levels of previous waves if vaccination uptake among the elderly is excellent (which isn’t the case in many areas in the US, though), but a lot of young people will get long covid.
It looks unclear whether vaccines even reduce the chances of catching long covid conditional on developing symptomatic covid. Or even conditional on developing asymptomatic covid, since there are some anecdotes about people developing long covid after asymptomatic infection. It’s possible that vaccines give a 30% reduction to the risk, but probably not more, and the 30% itself is uncertain. Long covid seems to be more likely to happen than I initially thought. I’m unsure whether it’s more like 1% or 4%, but it definitely seems significant. (Probably it’s possible to figure out with certainty what the odds are – I just haven’t looked into it in a while.)
According to this German article, the Robert Koch institute estimates that 85% of the population needs to be doubly vaccinated to guarantee herd immunity to the Delta variant. This is borderline unachievable. (Edit: I think they actually mean 12+ year olds, instead of the full population. Even so.)
Without that level of vaccination, you cannot open up too much, or you’ll have a slowly growing surge of cases that won’t go away until herd immunity is reached naturally. This means case counts being >1% (and >>1%) for many weeks or even months, as is happening now in the UK.
Deaths may not reach the levels of previous waves if vaccination uptake among the elderly is excellent (which isn’t the case in many areas in the US, though), but a lot of young people will get long covid.
It looks unclear whether vaccines even reduce the chances of catching long covid conditional on developing symptomatic covid. Or even conditional on developing asymptomatic covid, since there are some anecdotes about people developing long covid after asymptomatic infection. It’s possible that vaccines give a 30% reduction to the risk, but probably not more, and the 30% itself is uncertain. Long covid seems to be more likely to happen than I initially thought. I’m unsure whether it’s more like 1% or 4%, but it definitely seems significant. (Probably it’s possible to figure out with certainty what the odds are – I just haven’t looked into it in a while.)