31–40 of 641 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Palestine is ambiguous. I assume you mean Gaza or West Bank? To Palestinians the entire country of Israel is Palestine. Hence the chant from the river to the sea Palestine will be free.
Obviously the OP is referring to West Bank and Gaza.
Is it implausible to think that continued transmission and mutation at this rate will cause a catastrophic worsening of the pandemic to an extent several orders of magnitude above what it is now? Vaccination is effective in the current state of the pandemic, but what's to prevent the built-up immune response of humankind being wiped out if the virus adapts enough?
People believe what's comfortable/convenient, not what's true. In very early 2020, when I was following the news of the virus development in Wuhan, China, I felt like a conspiracy theorist pointing out to friends and coworkers that a bad epidemic spreading in one of the most crowded parts of the world. They thought it was ridiculous to say that hospitals were getting overwhelmed, people were being quarantined etc. Do…
Is there any information on what the upper bound might be on the infectivity of SARS-CoV-2? I think a lot of people just assume one big jump consumes most of the range, but we've seen at least three big jumps so far ("Doug", "Alpha", and "Delta").
For a variety of reasons media and influential organizations have avoided considering the upper bound on virility and mortality (? Not sure the right term) of covid.
But to think delta is it would be some kind of miracle. It would mean we are going through the worst of it, and that after we handle delta globally, people can worry about other things.
But it doesn’t stand to reason that we are done here with covid. There are too many hotspots and I believe delta is older than most of the big ones right now.
How likely is a nasty new variant not pop out of Iran or India, or Texas?
What about variants created by non-human beings like rats? [1] Are we going to skate by on those? That would be great!
I suspect the public is not ready to fully address the breadth and depth of covid’s impact. I also speculate that the “booster” shot suddenly being prescribed is intended to help ward off future variants as much or more so than delta alone.
[1] https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/researchers-find-covid...
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i was wondering this the other day. the next big mutations may not be more infectious because they can survive outside the body longer, but because they get around existing immunity or theres a longer asympomatic-but-still-transmissible phase. theres a lot of different paths this could take to mass infection.
Receptor binding affinity can also increase too, or like Alpha did, further suppress interferon production. Lots of ways...
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.06.425392v3
"in vitro evolution enhancing binding by 600-fold provides guidelines towards potentially new evolving mutations with even higher infectivity" :/
Is it implausible to think that continued transmission and mutation at this rate will cause a catastrophic worsening of the pandemic to an extent several orders of magnitude above what it is now? Vaccination is effective in the current state of the pandemic, but what's to prevent the built-up immune response of humankind being wiped out if the virus adapts enough?
Which is why I think it was a bone-headed move to not suspend patent protection on the vaccines. Thanks Bill Gates!
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300% is still a lot of room to grow. Delta is only about twice as bad as the wild type strain.
I'm not sure "only twice as bad" paints an accurate picture. - Herd immunity is much harder. Calculated as 1 - 1/r0 where r0 is defined in relation to transmissibility. So if r0 = 3 that's ~66% need to be immune to stop the virus. If r0 = 6 that's 83% needed, much higher threshold. - The virus is only getting more deadly. A preprint study found delta has "120% greater risk of hospitalization, 287% greater risk of ICU…
https://www.businessinsider.com/delta-variant-made-herd-immu...
Fortunately the vaccines are very effective at preventing death for all variants.
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Uh... citation? And as you know, neutralizing response is not the only type.
A study demonstrating the mechanism for Delta ADE in vivo: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34384810/ Highly-vaccinated Israel's third-wave surge in both cases and deaths: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/israel/ Unvaccinated Palestine's lack of third wave deaths: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/state-of-p...
Not only is that article not a study but rather a letter to the editor, but also in their last paragraph they explicitly state that ADE in SARS-CoV-2 has never been demonstrated in vivo. Here is the relevant quote from the letter:
>[...] Although this potential risk has been cleverly anticipated before the massive use of Covid-19 vaccines6, the ability of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies to mediate infection enhancement in vivo has never been formally demonstrated. [...]
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Delta-infected patients seem to be 1.8 times more likely to be hospitalised, compared to Alpha-infected patients [1]. Since the covid virus takes two weeks plus to kill its host and also spreads while the host is asymptomatic, there really isn't much selective pressure to make it less deadly. So far infectiousness and severity of disease has gone hand in hand with this virus. 1. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/article…
> Early data from Scotland indicated that delta-infected Covid patients were 1.8 times more likely to be hospitalized than those with an alpha infection. Other U.K. data support the increased risk of hospitalization but do not provide clear evidence that delta patients experience more severe illness once in the hospital. How do hospitals identify individual patients infected by Alpha, Delta or other variant? Do they…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Uh... citation? And as you know, neutralizing response is not the only type.
A study demonstrating the mechanism for Delta ADE in vivo: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34384810/ Highly-vaccinated Israel's third-wave surge in both cases and deaths: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/israel/ Unvaccinated Palestine's lack of third wave deaths: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/state-of-p...