In the past few days information from Atlanta CDC has indicated some disturbing facts about the new Delta variant. Namely:
It is almost as contagious as chicken pox.
People who are double vaccinated can still get the virus.
The viral load (the number of viruses) in vaccinated and unvaccinated people are the same and it is much higher than the previous strains. Some say a thousand times!
Vaccinated people can still transmit the disease and get serious illness.
More likely to cause more severe Covid-19 illness.
They are saying that one person with the Delta variant will spread it to eight or nine others. Previously the original virus was said to spread it to 2 others. So instead of progressing from 1 to 2 to 4 to 8 to 16. This is going from 1 to 9 to 81 to 729 to 6,561… If you assume that it takes a week to spread it to 9 others. It would only take 8 weeks to infect 43M people. Which is close to the population of Canada. And it would take just another week to infect 387M people, more than the entire population of the US. Of course, distances and geography will prevent such an uncontrolled spread, but this shows how much faster this new variant is.
Previously the idea was that the vaccinated will form a sort of buffer to slow down the infection and protect the unvaccinated but now that the vaccinated can transmit this disease, the herd immunity strategy is out the window. Nevertheless, vaccinated people are 3 times less likely to get infected and greatly reduced the chance of serious health complications.
Considering the fact that this variant results in more cases of serious illness, this new variant will cause major disruption especially in areas with low vaccination rate. You can see the number of patients in ICU in the US is going exponential. This will surely dampen economic growth, affect the stock market and slow the central banks from raising interest rates.
Keep an eye on the hospitalization and death numbers to predict whether the states will take more tightening measures and thus, slow down the recovery. The infection rate will become less and less relevant as policy makers shift their focus to economic recovery.