Speaker 1: Let's talk a little bit about the pandemic.
We are embroiled right now in a battle between coronavirus vaccines and something known as
the Delta covid variant.
We're also going to talk more about the Delta variant on today's bonus show.
We have an extraordinarily strong situation here in the United States against the virus,
as I will show you shortly.
But there are real warning signs globally right now which signal that unless we keep
vaccinating and really vaccinate more people more quickly, we could be in a real problematic
situation very soon, within a couple of months.
So let me walk you through it.
At first glance, if you look at us covid cases, you see that cases have dropped now more than
95 percent from the pandemic high of about two hundred and fifty five thousand cases
a day now down to about 11000 cases a day.
That is a massive reduction, more than 95 percent when you look at covid deaths in the
United States.
You also see really strong numbers.
In fact, deaths are down more than 91 percent from their pandemic, high of more than 30,
400 per day to just 300 deaths per day.
Now, these are fantastic numbers.
We are getting down to what we would call like baseline flu level risk.
Now, when you look globally, it still looks good, but it's not quite as good.
And what I mean by that is that while globally cases are still down, they're decreasing more
and more slowly.
Global cases peaked around 830000.
We're now down about 56 percent to about four hundred and seventy thousand global covid
cases per day.
But if you're looking at the charts that we're displaying here, you'll see the decline is
leveling out.
It's a decline, but it's a slower and slower decline.
And similarly on global deaths, we see deaths are now down globally, about 44 percent from
their peak.
But just in the last few days, that decline has also started to slow down a little bit.
So what's happening here?
What's driving this?
What's happening is that a more contagious by about 60 percent variant called the Delta
variant is spreading quickly in some countries.
This variant, as we talked about last week with Dr. Ashish Jha, this is a variant that
not only spread 60 percent more quickly, it's becoming dominant.
If we look at cases in the United Kingdom, cases are going up.
Now, this is not cases are going down, but more slowly, we are actually seeing an increase
in cases in the United Kingdom.
They were down to under 2000 new cases a day.
They're now back up to almost 10000 cases a day.
Now, you might see this in, say, David, this is no problem.
You know why?
Because in the U.S., we've vaccinated way more people than in the United Kingdom.
So we don't have to worry.
And you would be 100 percent wrong.
If you look at vaccination rates by country, you see that the US has fully vaccinated 45
percent of our population and the UK has fully vaccinated more, 47 percent of its population.
It is wrong to say we don't have to worry about Delta because we vaccinated more people.
We haven't.
What's happening is that the Delta variant is dominant in the UK already and in the US
it is not yet dominant.
This variant started in India.
60 percent of new cases in the UK are now the Delta variant.
Only 10 percent of new cases in the US are now the Delta variant.
So what that means is we are simply on a delay from what is happening in the United Kingdom.
Now, let's be really, really clear.
If you were vaccinated, at least with the vaccines approved here, Fizer, Moderna or
Johnson and Johnson, you were protected against the Delta variant.
The vaccines work really well against the Delta variant.
The problem is that 55 percent of the country has no protection right now.
And so when you say, well, our pool of vaccinated people is half the country and this variant
spread 60 percent more easily, you are going to get more and more cases among the unvaccinated,
but you will also get more cases among the vaccinated because vaccination is not 100
percent.
It's just simple math.
If you have a vaccine that's 95 percent effective, when there aren't many cases around you, that
five percent that's not protected is less likely to get the virus.
If you have a 95 percent effective vaccine and there's a ton of cases around you because
of unvaccinated people, it's just statistically more likely you will have an interaction with
an unvaccinated and possibly infected person.
And you'll see more of what are called breakthrough cases.
Never mind, of course, that among the unvaccinated, if something is 60 percent more contagious,
it's going to spread like wildfire among the unvaccinated.
So this is now a race.
If we can keep vaccinating, maybe we can suppress the Delta variant better than the UK simply
because we're behind where they are in terms of the spread of that variant becoming dominant.
It's, you could say, a geographical thing.
It got to the UK first, 60 percent of their new cases are now Delta.
Only 10 percent of ours are.
It's still here.
It's still spreading.
The percentage of cases here that are Delta is growing.
But we have the benefit of you know, it seems like it's probably a couple of months of time
to get more and more people vaccinated.
That's the fundamental battle right now.
I'd get vaccinated.
I did.
And if I were you, I would do the exact same thing.
Let's now talk a little bit about the evolution of a vaccine opposition globally