If You Think Covid is Over, Think Again
Why It’s Going to Be Another Long, Bleak Covid Winter
We’re now two years into a global pandemic. And Europe’s going into lockdown again. Meanwhile in America and Britain, cases have never really fallen — just plateaued at a consistently high level. Is it going to be another brutal, bleak Covid winter?
I have good news, and I have bad news.
See that chart above? It’s the most important bit of research into Covid and vaccines so far, period. Everyone should know it, but few do. Everyone should understand what it means so let me explain it.
This is one of those charts that tells a story — a dramatic and urgent one. A story which lets us peer deep into the future. I’m going to try to tell you that story.
The story begins with a study done in Israel, of more than 16,000 cases, comparing the vaccinated to the unvaccinated. What did the study find? Take a look at the left panel of the chart.
The X-axis is time — days since the second vaccine dose. The Y-axis is, for all intents and purposes efficacy. It’s expressed in “Ct regression coefficients” — that just means how many less Covid genes were expressed, relative to the unvaccinated group. Let’s get technical for a second now — and you can skip this if you want. You can think of the Y-axis as the difference in the mitigating effect of vaccines on viral loads, between the vaccinated and unvaccinated.
Now. To test for Covid using a PCR test, there’s something called a “cycle threshhold” — that simply means that how many times the machine has to try to copy the amount of nucleic acids (RNA/DNA) present to produce a positive result on the test. So if there is a high viral load — meaning lots of COVID nucleic acids present — then the cycle threshold is lower, because it takes less time to replicate the COVID that’s there because there’s simply more of it to start with.
A higher “Ct regression coefficient” simply means the reduction in viral loads between the vaccinated and unvaccinated. You just multiply the Ct coefficient by two to get to an estimate of viral loads, or as the researchers say “a difference of 1 Ct unit is approximately equivalent to a factor of 2 in the number of viral particles per…
