Delta Variant

Apart from Hepatitis C, I don't know any viruses that can be cured other than waiting it out for the immune system to take care of it. Maybe that are more cases like that but I don't know of more.

So maybe it's hard to get rid of viruses? As an uneducated person in this subject, it looks that way to me.

‘Haven’t read the piece’

The article states that Israel is still seeing 90%+ protection against hospitalizations and death for those who are vaccinated, while the Delta variant spreads there.

Vaccination has been the answer all along. You may still get symptomatic COVID but the likelihood of it putting you in the hospital, or worse, is greatly diminished.

The biggest issues in developed countries who have been able to vaccinate everyone willing to get vaccinated are:

1) People choosing not to get vaccinated 2) Children, who either can't get vaccinated, or parents are unsure if it's a good idea

#1 seems simple -- lockdown post-vaccine was pretty much a non-starter most places and there isn't much evidence with this Delta variant that this was a wrong decision. Those at-risk who can't get vaccinated need to isolate. Those who can get vaccinated and choose not to are accepting the risk. With the vaccine still protecting at 90%+, I don't even see the anti-vax folks causing much external effect outside of their population.

#2 is trickier. Vaccinating children feels much riskier to me and I've not decided if my own kids should get the shots or not. Given that COVID has shown to be minimally impactful for children compared to adults as well as compared to other viruses children commonly get, it seems mostly unnecessary. However, if Delta proves to be more dangerous for kids, those who feel vaccines are fine for adults but are doubtful for kids, will really need to rethink things.

Some counterpoint. A lot of the assertions, particularly the fact that delta is dramatically more transmissible than ancestral type, are reported as fact in the mainstream, but the evidence for this particular claim is thin. It certainly is true that delta is outcompeting the other strains. But inferring higher transmissibility from observational or ecological studies is not really sound. Most of the increases can be explained by human behavior - a third to a half of Americans are not fully vaccinated, and people are going out, not wearing masks, etc. Determining higher transmissibility in the virological sense is a difficult experiment and I don't think is really being done.

This is discussed in some detail in TWiV[777], a discussion with Ron Fouchier. If you use influenza as a model, the picture looks completely different - new strains are coming up all the time and outcompeting the older ones, but that's just because people have developed immunity to the older ones (antigenic drifts). The new ones are not fundamentally different or more transmissible. For people who don't want to listen to the whole thing, the main point is also made in a NYT opinion piece[2].

Pueyo claims that alpha is 60% more transmissible than ancestral type, but again the evidence doesn't strongly support this. Indeed, a preprint just came out[3] in which alpha looks pretty much identical to ancestral type when it comes to viral loads and clearance.

I've really enjoyed and appreciated Pueyo's writings. In particular, I think "The Hammer and the Dance" was groundbreaking and we could still learn the lessons from it. But I think this one is a miss: it could present real insight, but instead mostly propagates conventional thinking.

There's a really interesting science communication aspect to delta: it's basically a proxy for the (very true) statement, "the virus is still dangerous." In fact, one prominent evolutionary biologist accused the NYT op-ed of verging on "delta denialism". Accurately communicating reality in a way that is useful to people is fantastically hard, and we just don't have an ecosystem for it. I think this is the reason I've become addicted to TWiV and other similar highbrow sources - I hate being fed partial information and feel compelled to learn more.

[777]: https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-777/

[2]: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/27/opinion/covid-vaccine-var...

[3]: https://twitter.com/BallouxFrancois/status/14149092626571141...

Hmm @dang this doesn't seem controversial, or shouldn't be. We should be curious about the details of a dangerous strain of a virus, and learn more about it. I'm not sure if this deserves to be "[flagged]" but perhaps I'm missing the bigger picture.