Delta predictions

 Last year, I won a bet with my chairman over when the COVID-19 pandemic would peak. In March of 2020, he accepted my bet: “I'll bet a bottle of that Japanese whiskey you picked out for me that the COVID-19 pandemic in the US will not have peaked by 22 April. You bet that it will on or before that date.” In the event, he paid off with a bottle of 16 year-old Lagavulin.

His confidence was based on a prediction by Micheal Levitt, a Nobel Prize-winning chemist who had begun dabbling in viral epidemiology. Levitt also predicted that Israel would have no more than 10 COVID-related deaths, a prophecy that has proven to be wrong by about two orders of magnitude.

What Levitt and my chairman (a biophysical chemist) got wrong is that human behavior, not viral biology or immunology, is rate-limiting in pandemics. Neither Levitt nor my chairman grew up in the US, but I did and have lived here all my life. I know my people, and I knew that far too many wouldn't do the right thing to slow the pandemic. Indeed, even with highly effective vaccines, Americans are still not doing enough to shut down the pandemic.

What matters most now is not the Delta variant, it's getting vaccinated, masking and social distancing until the pandemic is over. https://www.medpagetoday.com/special-reports/exclusives/94869?xid=nl_mpt_DHE_2021-10-06&eun=g1700464d0r&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily%20Headlines%20Top%20Cat%20HeC%20%202021-10-06&utm_term=NL_Daily_DHE_dual-gmail-definition