Is that the 4th wave I see?
Here are a couple of charts that make me think the 4th COVID wave is on its way.
UPDATE: I posted this originally on 19 July. The Globe & Mail published a story on 26 July summarizing why Delta is a big problem, regardless of vaccination rates. My predictions seem less and less surprising.
UPDATE 2: 31 July. From CBC: “Canada’s top health officials are warning that Canada could be seeing the beginning of a fourth COVID-19 wave driven by the more infectious delta variant.”
UPDATE 3: 10 August. Called it.
Back in February 2021, I posted on pluspora that I believed a 3rd wave was inevitable:
I was, unfortunately, right. By mid-March, the 3rd wave was well under way in Ontario.
Today, I visited Our World in Data, and looked up a couple of charts.
I see here the same general trend I saw back in February. Overall, I see new case rates increasing, and I see it pretty much everywhere.
Exponential growth is always like that at the start — deceptively slight. But inevitably it will grow faster and faster if we don’t intervene early, quickly, and strongly.
Back in February, I was advocating for an immediate three-week shutdown of everything in Ontario. I wasn’t the only one. But of course our government is a gaggle of feckless prats. It was only on 3 April when Ontario finally locked down, sort of.
Here’s what happened in Ontario.
You can see why I got worried in mid-February — we had a clear inflection point. Now scan right to early April: by the time we locked down, we were already about halfway to our 3rd wave peak and were already getting twice as many new cases as we did in mid-February!
If we’d locked down hard by early March, I think we could have avoided the lion’s share of cases (and deaths) that happened between April and June.
What’s worse, the lateness of Ontario’s lockdown resulted in a longer lockdown. A hard three-week lockdown in late February or early March would have probably nipped the 3rd wave in the bud; as it happened, though, we had to endure a lockdown that lasted nine-ish weeks (depending on how you measure the end of a lockdown).
Our government, which claims to be protecting the population as well as the economy, is doing neither. Many people died unnecessarily during the 3rd wave, and the unnecessarily long lockdown created unnecessary stress on the economy. Hoping that people will do the right thing is a mug’s game. The IQ of a mob is the average IQ of its members divided by its size. And there’s over 14 million members in the mob called Ontario. The result was nine weeks of hell instead of (probably) only three.
But… but… but… the vaccines!!!!
Yeah, well, numbers don’t lie: new case rates are increasing. And the Delta and Delta+ variants, with all their spike protein mutations that can influence vaccine efficacy, are still not well understood.
Of course, it’s a moral imperative for everyone who can get vaccinated to do so. No vaccine is perfect, but all vaccines help. Get vaccinated.
Still, unless and until we get another inflection point, one that shows case rates are slowing, then we’re idiots to think we’re out of the woods.
In the meantime, the Ontario government announced today that it expects University classes to go back to “in person classes” in September, requiring only mask-wearing — no physical distancing or room occupancy limits.
In the immortal words of Hannibal King:
