A Fourth Wave?

During the last 18 months, the world has learned about and to live with Covid-19. Having worked with exponential functions, it still impresses me that when a new wave of infections has started, how fast the number of cases increases.

Currently, there is a great deal of vaccination fatigue everywhere. The current Covid-19 outbreaks in countries with high vaccination rates, such as the United Kingdom (54% fully vaccinated) and Israel (61% fully vaccinated), are mainly due to unvaccinated younger adults who had resumed intense social activities as protective measures were lifted.

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The delta variant of the virus (90% in Germany) drives the current incidence rates. They are soaring in the UK and Israel, with 496 and 227 daily cases per 100,000 people, respectively. In Germany (48% fully vaccinated), the incidence rate has increased too,  but at present, it is still only 13 cases per 100,000.

It is essential to convince younger adults of the benefits of vaccination to break the new Covid spread. Who has the guts to tell all voluntarily unvaccinated people that they will be infected in all self-determination, regardless of age?

Will Germany run in another Corona shutdown coming fall? No, say the experts. Even at a high infection rate, Germany's health system will not approach borderline conditions this time.

The Robert Koch Institute (RKI) published graphs showing the development of a fourth wave, the delta wave, in Germany. The new Covid-19 wave depends on the number of people vaccinated, considering that vulnerable people are now fully vaccinated, and unvaccinated younger healthy people show milder cases of Corona.

 

©phoenix/RKI

If the vaccination rate among 12- to 59-year-olds does not exceed 65% by April 2022, up to 12,000 people could end up in intensive care. According to the model, at 75%, the number drops below 7,500, at 85% below 5,000, and at 95% below 3,000. Consequently, the RKI is working on a new parameter focusing on the strain on intensive care rather than on the obsolete Covid incidence rate.

The real problem, however, is the children, who have not yet received a vaccination offer. It was shown that the delta variants significantly more frequently affected children. If they are infected by the dozen, the threat of long-covid illnesses may accompany them for life. The nasty consequences of a Covid infection haunt an entire generation.

How to balance the extent of long-covid, the importance of collateral damage from school closures, and the side effects from Corona vaccinations in children?

Long-covid invalidates the argument that the coronavirus is not dangerous for young people or people with no previous illness. Note: Only those who avoid infection do not risk long-term consequences.

The future spread of Covid depends on the percentage of vaccinated people. Here are two worked-out paragraphs from an article by Ullrich Fichtner in Der Spiegel about the situation in Germany titled, "Die große Impflücke (The vast vaccination gap.)."

"Vaccine skeptics form an extremely colorful coalition. They have doctorates or not much schooling; they are wealthy or penniless. They are at home in the urban, alternative, or green milieus, but you find them in peasant, traditional, and rural areas too. Their doubts derive from Christian or pagan sources, from homeopathic, anthroposophic teachings, from esoteric misunderstandings, sometimes also from 'völkisch' ideas, and above all from a lot of 'gut feeling.'"

"Luckily, this small but shrilly group often dismissed as cranks is not decisive. The doubters, the fearful or the overcautious, the undecided, and the overinformed are what is decisive. There are all those who have university degrees and still believe in false alternatives, all those who are too lazy to stand in line at a vaccination center, those who underestimate the disease, or those who speculate - mistakenly - that they will soon be protected, even without their vaccination because the herd will be sufficiently immune."

Sorry folks. Your only choice is between vaccination and infection; the no-vax attitude will cost lives. 

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