(2021-01-28) Klein Opinion The New Virus Strains Make The Next 6 Weeks Crucial

Ezra Klein Opinion: The New COVID-19 Virus Strains Make the Next 6 Weeks Crucial. The B.1.1.7 variant of coronavirus, first seen in Britain, and now spreading throughout Europe, appears to be 30 to 70 percent more contagious, and it may be more lethal, too

America is doing embarrassingly little genomic testing, but even the paltry surveillance that is being conducted has confirmed epidemiologists’ fears: B.1.1.7 is here, too. And there’s evidence of another super-contagious strain developing in California

Paul Romer’s modeling suggests that if we continue on our current path, delivering one million vaccinations a day and growing fatigued of lockdowns and masks, more than 300,000 could die in the coming months.

Let’s agree that total lockdown is the most ruinous of all options, and the one we’d like to use least. We have tools we could deploy to avoid it, but we’d need to start quickly. One is rapid, at-home testing

The problem here is the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). They have been disastrously slow in approving these tests and have held them to a standard more appropriate to doctor’s offices than home testing.

Biden has proposed spending $50 billion on testing, and a chunk of that money will go to genomic sequencing.

Better masking would also make a difference.

“I want to see very direct guidance from the C.D.C. of masks people should be wearing in different contexts,” Jha told me. He said that with the new strains, he won’t go into a grocery store unless he’s double-masked, or wearing an N95, or the South Korean equivalent, a KF94.

Then, of course, there’s vaccination

Early testing shows the vaccines easily neutralize the B.1.1.7 variant, and while there is a South Africa strain that shows some resistance to the vaccine, the level of antibodies the vaccine produces should still be sufficient. If it isn’t, BioNTech says they could produce a targeted booster in about six weeks.

Romer’s calculations suggest that two million vaccinations a day could keep us ahead of the new strains.