“I still have us roughly on track for reaching HIT in July.”
That seems to be what the White House/CDC are planning on.
As you have pointed out before, the curve is different, for different variants. Also, natural immunity is big unknown both prior exposures and cross-immunities. That likely varies from place to place as well. Some places will hit it early, others late.
I think that enough of the early thresholds have been been crossed, to start seeing declines in the overall averages already.
Yeah, just took them a while to catch up to the conclusions I reached back in February. :-)
"As you have pointed out before, the curve is different, for different variants. Also, natural immunity is big unknown both prior exposures and cross-immunities. That likely varies from place to place as well. Some places will hit it early, others late. I think that enough of the early thresholds have been been crossed, to start seeing declines in the overall averages already."
Absolutely! If the April 2020 variant were the only one out there, I would say we've already reached the HIT and should see nothing but declines even if vaccinations ceased today. However, I'm accounting for the UK, South Africa, Brazil, and India variants - all of which are already here - since natural selection will favor the emergence of the most infectious one(s) once the number of vulnerable hosts is reduced past a certain point. It's critical we continue to reduce the number of vulnerable hosts through inoculation to reduce the risk of new variants emerging which are more difficult to deal with using the currently available tools (e.g. a new antibody-resistant variant).