This week’s news is that the FDA advisory committee voted overwhelmingly to update the vaccine for Omicron, after a delay of only six months, which means they’ll get to deciding which way it should be updated Real Soon Now and then they can tell the pharma companies what requirements they want to place on that. There’s some chance the update will happen at a time that isn’t never, and even a tiny chance the update might not be hopelessly behind the virus when it happens. You never know.

Executive Summary

BA.5 now the dominant strain.
We might eventually update the vaccines. Maybe.
Authorities are still using misinformation to justify policy.

Let’s run the numbers.

The Numbers

Note that I am increasingly forced to make adjustments to account for obviously delayed or wrong reporting. Florida reports every two weeks, and a number of states did something requiring at least some form of adjustment. These decisions are

Predictions

Prediction from last week: 675k cases (+14%) and 2,015 deaths (+14%).

Results: 679k cases (+14%) and 2,048 deaths (+16%).

Prediction for next week (4th of July!): 600k cases (-13%) and 1,800 deaths (-16%).

This is a holiday prediction. I expect the true situation to hold roughly steady, with drops due to the extra reporting this week going away plus the missing reporting next week.

Deaths

Cases

As expected this is a bounce back from the holiday weekend. Now we are headed into another holiday weekend, so I expect a drop back down again. Things are less smooth at the state level than they appear at the regional level, but nothing is that dramatic.

We are entering the period of most rapid percentage growth in BA.5 on a week-to-week basis, so if we are going to see that transition cause a lot of problems then these next two weeks are when we will see clear signs of that.

BA.1.2.3.4.5

BA.4 and BA.5 are now the dominant strains.

Technically BA.2.12.1 is bigger than either of them in the latest data set, but by the time the data gets reported BA.5 will have passed it. None of this was ever in doubt.

The good news is that so far there is no sign of the next variant.

Eric Topol covers our new dominant strain, BA.5.

If Omicron really is off in a complete different direction than any of the previous dominant strains, then that is importantly good news. It means that O...

Aaron U

Aaron U

Aaron U

Aaron U