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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: We have a Delta variant wave in the United States; what is the Delta variant of COVID? Why is it dangerous? And what’s your prognostication prognosis?
Rick Rosner: All right, so the world has been watching India and particularly England. I think the Delta variant really took hold first. So everybody’s looking at Britain, where COVID numbers are up twenty-six hundred percent daily COVID. And they say the U.S. is about a month behind. Currently, the COVID numbers in the U.S. are up two hundred to two hundred and fifty percent, all Delta in Britain in the high 90s. The number of cases that are Delta variant, mainly in the unvaccinated, some they call it a breakthrough case is yet COVID, even though you are vaccinated. Britain has 66 million people. Twenty million have yet to be vaccinated, a much lower percentage than almost every other country. But it’s fucking scary because Britain now has more than 50000 new cases a day, which, if you do the math, means that more than one out of every four hundred unvaccinated Brits is catching COVID every fucking day. Which is insane and scary.
Now, it’s not. Delta is not killing as high a percentage of people as were dying from earlier waves. Some of the cases, I believe, are in vaccinated people and Delta and somebody who’s fully vaccinated is very unlikely to kill them. I haven’t seen all the stats, but the new case numbers are fucking scary. Everybody expects it to hit the U.S. Anybody who looks at the numbers and doesn’t have some stupid agenda expects Delta to hit. Delta is now fifty-eight percent of all new U.S. cases, and people expect it to become 99 percent of all new U.S. cases, and it hit us hard. Florida is up to four hundred. It’s over 8,000 new cases a day. Republicans States are getting hit harder because some Trump states have as few as one-third of the population vaccinated. A massive amount of vaccine resistance in the U.S. is growing rage, with one-third of the adult population refusing to get vaccinated. Whether that will have any effect, it’s hard to tell.
At the peak of people getting vaccinated, the U.S. was vaccinating three million people a day. Now we’re down to half a million a day because assholes refused to get vaccinated. So we may get hit even harder than Britain is by Delta, which is crazy since we have half the population vaccinated that we should start getting raw new case numbers that are higher. Almost nobody was immunized, and we got a quarter million new cases daily. But if we start getting a fraction of unvaccinated people catching Delta Britain currently has, then that would be four hundred thousand new U.S. cases a day, which is 40 percent higher than we were even during the horrible third one.
The ongoing vaccine resistance means that COVID will have a fat tail that will still be getting COVID a year and a half from now. I haven’t looked in detail at what made the Spanish flu fade away, which started in 1918. It was still virulent in 1919 but didn’t hit that many places hard in 1920, mainly because maybe, maybe primarily, because one-third of the Earth’s population had gotten it, which gave people some stiff resistance. And perhaps it mutated into a less virulent form or a less contagious form. I don’t know, but it’s fucking ridiculous that it may take something like that to make COVID fade away. If it does in the next couple of years, because of the vaccine resistance, it looks like COVID will have a fat tail where England had knocked it down to almost nothing or relatively nothing. Two thousand cases a day, compared to fifty-four thousand now. You might go a couple of days with nobody dying from COVID-19 in all of the U.K., and now it’s back hugely. So in the U.S., we’re at eight hundred to a thousand percent increase in new cases over the last month.
In L.A. County, I expect a 10-fold increase in new cases in the U.S. compared to the low levels after the end of the fourth wave by the first week of August. And for us to have a 20-fold increase over June by the end of it and for it to persist as long as the terrible third wave continued, which was five or six months. So, almost until the end of the year, it won’t. It won’t kill as many people as died in the U.S. third wave. This wave might only kill one hundred and fifty thousand Americans because it’s less virulent. But I don’t know guys like Tucker Carlson. You have to be vaccinated to work at Fox News, and the 90-year-old guy who owns Fox News and other conservative news outlets do much programming with the intent of increasing vaccine skepticism, fear and resistance. And as long as that’s going on, we’ll still have, you know, roughly a quarter of the adult U.S. population unvaccinated, and COVID won’t go away in the end.
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Authors[1]
American Television Writer
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Founder, In-Sight Publishing
Scott.Douglas.Jacobsen@Gmail.Com
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Rick Rosner 