(2021-01-12) Hunt The Ireland Event

Ben Hunt: The Ireland Event. For the past year, I’ve been consumed with how Covid-19 numbers are used/manipulated to create political narratives. Last week I became consumed by a new twist on all this – Covid numbers that were being largely ignored. Insane infection numbers coming out of UK and Ireland, apparently driven by a new virus strain (B117).

I believe there is a non-trivial chance that the United States will experience a rolling series of “Ireland events” over the next 30-45 days, where the Covid effective reproductive number (Re not R0) reaches a value between 2.4 and 3.0 in states and regions where a) the more infectious UK-variant (or similar) Covid strain has been introduced, and b) Covid fatigue has led to deterioration in social distancing behaviors.

Current US government policy rejects the possibility of an Ireland event, largely because of what I believe is a politically-motivated analysis by the CDC that models more than 100 million Americans already possessing Covid antibodies, prior to any vaccination effort.

I think this model is wrong, and I think the CDC knows that it’s wrong.

I think it’s wrong because the 2021 behavior of someone who thinks they might have Covid is very different from the 2015 behavior of someone who thought they might have had the flu, but the CDC assumes it is the same in their models.

I think the CDC knows this model is wrong because if it were true – if they actually thought that one-third of Americans were already effectively immunized by having Covid antibodies – this would be an ENORMOUS factor in determining vaccination policy. Otherwise, you are going to be wasting one-third of your precious supply of vaccines on people who don’t need it.

So yes, I think this model is nuts

But this CDC model is why prominent Covid like Scott Gottlieb and Anthony Fauci have said that they expect daily case numbers to decline from here on out

Unfortunately, once it becomes apparent that an Ireland event is occurring, it’s too late to stop it.

Notably, the UK-variant is, relatively speaking, significantly more infectious than the baseline virus for “close contacts” (not face-to-face, up to 2 meters apart) rather than “direct contacts”, meaning that the UK-variant virus is particularly successful at bridging the air gap between strangers or short-duration contacts in an indoor space. This is … ummm … troubling. As lax as we all have gotten with our mask wearing and our social distancing outside of the home, the UK-variant virus dramatically reduces the margin of error we have with mask wearing and social distancing outside of the home.