Delta, or B.1.617.2, is particularly dangerous. As I’ve written before, this variant spreads much more quickly than other strains of the coronavirus and may cause more severe illness, though scientists are still investigating that second point. Thanks to this variant, it’s now much more dangerous to be unvaccinated than it was a year ago. It’s quickly becoming dominant in the U.S.
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The Delta variant (also known as B.1.617.2) was first identified in India earlier this spring. It’s now known to spread more easily than any other variant found so far and evade immunity from a prior COVID-19 infection. It’s now spreading rapidly in the U.S.
Read MoreWe finally have a straightforward variant naming system: on May 31, the WHO announced a system using letters of the Greek alphabet. B.1.1.7 (first identified in the U.K. is now Alpha, B.1.351 (first identified in South Africa) is now Beta, and so on.
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Cases, deaths, and hospitalizations all continue to drop nationwide. The U.S. reported about 3,000 COVID-19 deaths last week, in total—at the peak of the winter surge, we saw more than 3,000 deaths a day.
Read MoreTwo more important CDC data updates for this week: the CDC added more options for its vaccine demographic data and more recent variant data.
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It takes three to four weeks for data on a variant COVID-19 case to be made public. I have been quietly stressing out about this fact for about a month, since I learned it from Will Lee, VP of science at the genomics company Helix. This lag time includes the actual sequencing process as well as coordination with public health authorities and sequencing data repositories.
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New cases are down for the second week in a row—good news after the 70,000-plus peak of mid-April. Still, 50,000-plus cases in a day is no good place to plateau, new hospital admissions remain over 5,000 a day, and vaccinations are slowing: the U.S. is now averaging about 2.6 million shots a day, down from 3.4 million a couple of weeks ago.
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I am really worried about Michigan. The state comprises a full 11% of new U.S. cases in the past week—and Michigan only makes up 3% of the national population. Nationally, cases continue to rise, driven by B.1.1.7 and other coronavirus variants
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This is the fourth week in a row of case increases in the U.S. While this week’s jump is lower (we went from 57,000 new daily cases two weeks ago, to 63,000 last week, to 64,000 this week), the level where we’ve landed is still reason for concern. Our case numbers now are comparable to last July, when the summer surge was threatening hospital systems in the South and West.
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The CDC has stepped up its sequencing efforts in a big way over the past few months, going from 3,000 a week in early January to 10,000 a week by the end of March. But data on the results of these efforts are scarce and uneven, with some states doing far more sequencing than others. And the CDC itself publishes data with gaping holes and lags that make the numbers difficult to interpret.
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