Curation notice by Raemon: Curated. It seems really important to figure out how to deal with the Delta variant, and how to interface with covid variants longterm. I appreciated this post for:

Striking a good balance of presenting current facts on the ground
Noting where assumptions lie
Being clear about it's epistemic status, while
Aiming to be useful in the immediate term.

(Not a doctor; merely extrapolating lines of reasoning where they will go; all policy “recommendations” are entirely hypothetical and not actual recommendations; I rushed to finish this while it's still useful and relevant, so errors will exist and I apologize for the style)

Summary

As many of you know, the Delta strain of COVID is basically upon us. In the Bay, as of a few days ago, about .4% of people had it (based on .1% confirmed cases).

Currently it's doubling every week or so, but it's surprisingly difficult to tell if it will be a small blip or a huge wave. The main reason it's hard to tell is that it's entirely dependent on human behavior, which could change quickly if people become scared or if the government institutes rules again. The second reason it's hard to tell is because of mixed evidence on the difficulty of reining it in—while different studies makes this look more or less difficult, India and the UK both appear to have successfully done this without obviously draconian behavioral interventions. Berkeley might easily peak at 1% and drop back down, but for this post I'll be talking about policies for if we get a large wave.

We also don't know very much about vaccine efficacy against Delta. We know that the good vaccines reduce your risk by about 60-90% compared to without the vaccine, but the error bars are extremely large on all these studies. In part this is because it's so hard to disentangle effects from different strains, behavioral change in the vaccinated, social bubble effects, etc. Further, it doesn't answer the important question of whether this means ~80% of people are totally safe, or if it means that standing a few feet closer to people than you do now will cause the 5x difference that moots your protection. (This also plays into the above issue of predicting whether we will have a large increase or not.)

That being said, we can still roughly estimate risk from definitely having Delta. A healthy 30yo probably has about 4x (3x-10x) less risk than before, due to v...

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