Andy Slavitt  🇺🇸 💉Verified account

So if you look at the curve on the right, the space under the curve between the colored lines & the low lines represents excess deaths from the mutation. It’s a big range— anywhere from 20,000 to 260,000 additional deaths— assuming our current projected rate of vaccinations. 7/

There are many simplifying assumptions here but the magnitude is worth understanding. 8/

Next question— why? Isn’t this supposed to be no more deadly? Think of the virus as being easier to attach to a cell. One way to think about it is if today it normally requires 1000 particles to cause infectiousness, the new strain requires about 60% fewer or 400 particles. 9/

If the virus spreads more easily, it will infect more high risk people who will be in need of hospitalization. It also prolongs the spread as the graphs show. It’s fattening the curve not flattening it. 10/

What about kids? Why is it impacting more kids? Kids aren’t actually more susceptible relative to others. They are more active. If the threshold is 60% lower, everyone is more susceptible. So more kids are just seeing a bigger jump. 11/

Now to the most speculative topic. How will the vaccines respond? Will the mRNA vaccines which have ad it’s benefit the tailor made nature of the reaction? 12/

There are labs around the world right now with assays of all the vaccines trying to answer that question. They are testing the sustained immune response but aren’t able to test t-cell response. 13/

They require 5 weeks or so to get definitive answer on how effective the vaccines are and I have data points that are too early to share. Too unreliable. So best to say we don’t know. But here’s my sense... 14/