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The mutation that helps Delta spread

nature.com

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Re: The mutation that helps Delta spread

#41

Post by OneLeggedCat »

slumdev wrote: post #8
nonbirithm wrote: post #6

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?

SARS-CoV-2 has four antigens. The existing vaccines stimulate the production of antibodies against only one of them, the spike protein. The existing vaccines are proving ineffective against Delta because it has mutated significantly enough that its spike protein does not cause a neutralizing immune response. They may even be causing ADE, as evidenced by the most recent data comparing Israel and Palestine.

> existing vaccines stimulate the production of antibodies against only one of them

Is this true for the J&J vax as well?

Re: The mutation that helps Delta spread

#42

Post by nradov »

walterbell wrote: post #27
erokar wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Generally hospitals don't test for specific variants. Instead they forward a sample subset of patient specimens to regional or national infectious disease centers which then perform genetic sequencing. That way we can monitor the spread and evolution of variants.

https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#monitoring-varaint...

Re: The mutation that helps Delta spread

#43

Post by jamespwilliams »

walterbell wrote: post #27
erokar wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

See https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/covid-19-variants...

Re: The mutation that helps Delta spread

#44

Post by [deleted] »

Mordisquitos wrote: post #38
slumdev wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

> A study demonstrating the mechanism for Delta ADE in vivo: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34384810/ 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…

[deleted]

Re: The mutation that helps Delta spread

#46

Post by rdedev »

slumdev wrote: post #28
YPCrumble wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a source for the recent data on ADE? I searched and didn’t find anything suggesting this. The only thing I see are studies that more vaccinated people are dying in Israel, but that is to be expected because the older people are, the more likely they are to be vaccinated and they have less immune response to the vaccine. Source https://twitter.com/rzioni/status/1426178482569109504

See my reply to a sibling comment. The most damning evidence comes from the comparison between highly-vaccinated Israel, where there are many third-wave deaths, and mostly-unvaccinated Palestine, where there isn't a third-wave death spike at all. Having mostly-unvaccinated Palestine as a control group is showing us that we don't know what we thought we knew.

The graphs you've mentioned in your sibling comment does not separate deaths based on vaccination. Here is another source that takes this into account. Vaccination does reduce chances of severe infections even in delta, though it's not as good as before:

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/08/20/1029628...

> The good news is that among Israel's serious infections on Thursday of this week, according to Health Ministry data, there were nine times more serious cases among unvaccinated people over age 60 (178.7 per 100,000) than among fully vaccinated people of the same age category, and a little more than double the number of serious infections among unvaccinated people in the under-60 crowd (3.2 per 100,000) than among the vaccinated in that age bracket.

Also do note that official numbers from Palestine could be undercounted because of the situation there

Re: The mutation that helps Delta spread

#47

Post by walterbell »

mellavora wrote: post #39
walterbell wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

genetic sequencing is pretty cheap these days.

Is it to the price level (e.g. under $1K) where an individual patient could pay a lab to sequence their own virus sample?

How about the cost of sequencing one drop of the vaccine vial they received, as a quality control sample of the distribution supply chain?

Re: The mutation that helps Delta spread

#48

Post by jdkuepper »

slumdev wrote: post #25
selimthegrim wrote: post #15

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...

Here is a more in-depth counterpoint to that preprint:

https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/08/16/a-...

Re: The mutation that helps Delta spread

#49

Post by cogman10 »

walterbell wrote: post #27
erokar wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Not every nation does this, mostly only the ones with socialized medicine are.

For nations like the US, we are measuring the variant by looking at sewage. It doesn't tell us anything about who ends up hospitalized, but it does give us a good indication of what the is the common variant in a community (and inferences are drawn from there).

The UK has been doing probably the most covid genome sequencing of any nation.

Re: The mutation that helps Delta spread

#50

Post by OneLeggedCat »

silicon2401 wrote: post #14
nonbirithm wrote: post #6

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…

> We can reasonably say the Black Death killed 30% of Europe's population. We can't reasonably say covid won't do the same

I was going along, nodding my head in agreement until this. Do you realize how bad medical care was during that era? Hygiene? Knowledge of how to slow transmission in a community (we Americans have not yet even BEGUN to really take COVID seriously)? Do you realize how vastly more deadly than Black Death that COVID will have to become to cause a 30% death rate among the general population? It's absurd.

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