03-10-2021, 09:50 PM
(03-10-2021, 05:30 PM)danbrotherston Wrote:(03-10-2021, 05:26 PM)jamincan Wrote: While the percentage of cases with a mutation are increasing it doesn't appear that there is a noticeable effect on the overall numbers yet, despite that being a clearly defined 3 week trend.
We don't really know that...because we haven't isolated the other factors. It's possible that with the red restrictions in place in most places, the numbers would have been dropping if it wasn't for the variants. Because the variants started becoming prevalent at the same time as we changed other factors we cannot know what the expected behaviour would have been (and for that matter, you can never really isolate all human behaviour). We *might* be able to evaluate the effect of policy vs. variants by doing a cross analysis between different zones, but there are an awful lot of variables.
I agree. Too many variables. But we do know there are a lot more variants now, possibly up to 30%. And we also know that while we have an uptrend in the number of cases, it's not exploding out of hand, at least not yet.
So, the increase in variants would explain why the case numbers are no longer dropping. And why we better not loosen any more restrictions anytime soon, until a substantial number of people has been vaccinated.