The 3 Simple Rules That Underscore the Danger of Delta:
1. The vaccines are still beating the variants.
2. The variants are pummeling unvaccinated people.
3. The longer Principle No. 2 continues, the less likely No. 1 will hold.
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| Twitter.com |
The discussion about vaccine-beating variants echoes the early debates about whether SARS-CoV-2 would go pandemic. “We don’t think too well as a society about low-probability events that have far-reaching consequences,” Majumder told me. “We need to prepare for a future where we are doing vaccine rollout again, and we need to figure out how to do that better.” In the meantime, even highly vaccinated nations should continue investing in other measures that can control COVID-19 but have been inadequately used—improved ventilation, widespread rapid tests, smarter contact tracing, better masks, places in which sick people can isolate, and policies like paid sick leave. Such measures will also reduce the spread of the virus among unvaccinated communities, creating fewer opportunities for an immune-escape variant to arise. “I find myself the broken record who always emphasizes all the other tools we have,” van Kerkhove said. “It’s not vaccines only. We’re not using what we have at hand.”
The WHO’s decision to name variants after the Greek alphabet means that at some point, we’ll probably be dealing with an Omega variant. Our decisions now will determine whether that sinister name is accompanied by equally sinister properties, or whether Omega will be just an unremarkable scene during the pandemic’s closing act.
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| News-Star |
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