There Seems to Be a New Wave Starting in Europe—Will it Come Here?

 

Today's geek-out post is inspired by an NPR Morning Edition story yesterday about what is likely a new infection wave gathering steam in Europe. Here is a chart from Our World in Data:

The story notes that we don't know yet whether this increase is associated with new variants, such as BA.2.75.2 that I was fretting about a week ago. I checked the EU Dashboard and indeed it looks like the OG Omicron is still dominant in France, Germany, and Italy (99.8% - 100% of sequences). 

That's odd because BA.5 is dominant here, with BA.4.6 close behind, and zero percent cases of OG Omicron (BA.1.1 or BA.1.1.529) according to the CDC:
I won't be losing any sleep over a new wave just yet. Current modeling shows that even in a scenario where there is a new variant it shouldn't get too bad depending on how many people get the new bivalent booster:


The dotted line is the actual observations, and we have been beating the expected numbers for the last couple of months. The solid line is the model projection, and the grey area shows the uncertainty in the model.

The model predicts that if no new variant takes hold (left two charts) we will probably see some kind of modest increase around the holidays. If a new variant like BA.2.75.2 —which has extreme immune escape capabilities—takes hold, we will get a bigger increase, depending on how many people get the booster. 

So far only about a third of adults have gotten the new booster. They are mostly old and Democrats. Only about a quarter of people who are outside those categories plan to get the shot as soon as possible, except for Republicans, 11% of whom fall in that category.  So if one of the worse scenarios in the modeling (on the right above) develops, we'll have the usual suspects to blame.

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