Maybe. All I’m doing is supplying the info from the latest research. Never said that TW will have same result.
There is a general COVID19 thread.
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@FairComment have you met @finley IRL yet? Not to make things awkward but… I feel a special connection between you two and I think it is high time you took things to the next level:
A maskless or (dare I venture) chin-diaper stroll in the park perhaps? I assume there will be 2 pairs of shoes walking along the path, not just one 
Delta variant could be particularly bad for Taiwan, as the death rate (iirc) from other variants is already higher (around double?) than the worldwide average.
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I remember ‘scientists’, last year, consistently saying that this virus is stable. Unusually stable, in fact. It doesn’t mutate. It’s so unusual how stable it is. Other coronaviruses, like the flu, mutate a lot. But not this one.
This was the consensus. The message was consistent and unchanging. Just like the virus. Until one day, when the vaccines started being rolled out, suddenly, it isn’t so stable anymore.
Interesting to say the least.
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Right. The whole vaccine marketing strategy was based on the idea that the vaccines would put an end to the problem. Take your vaccine and you’ll be safe, even from hypothetical future mutations. And now they’re telling us that the virus is going to mutate around the vaccine.
The truly bizarre aspect of this new cock-and-bull story is that it’s blatantly false. The vaccines do more-or-less work on the variants; and since the original risk of harm was tiny to begin with (unless you’re a 90-year-old diabetic), getting vaccinated reduces your all-cause mortality risk to almost exactly what it was before COVID.
But we can’t have people being reassured, can we? The fear must continue at maximum.
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I don’t disagree that there’s an irrational fear that’s more prevalent in some places than others, but I also think you’re missing a big part of the narrative: that variants like Delta are precisely why vaccination is so important.
In the US, the Delta virus will probably be the dominant strain within weeks. It’s in 49 states. The local news is talking about this. But here in Cali, they haven’t rolled back the reopening. I ate at 2 restaurants yesterday that were packed and most people weren’t wearing masks. The message that is being sent currently is that getting vaccinated is important and that it’s the people who haven’t been vaxxed who are at greatest risk. This is true.
There’s no panic in the streets. At all. Could always change but right now the attitude seems to be “if you don’t get vaxxed and you get really sick, don’t say you weren’t warned.” There’s 0 talk of lockdowns or reinstated restrictions.
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This just isn’t true. Scientists have been saying consistently that this virus mutates at a much slower rate than influenza. Which is true. Nobody has said “It doesn’t mutate.”
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So the virus is going to keep mutating until a deadly strain comes up, and by that time the majority of the US would have the virus already. I think I’ve played this game before on my phone.
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The funny thing is that it always mutates into something worse.
We humans are really unlucky.
Covid-19 officially ends here in Oregon on June 30 even though the Delta variant is spreading and will soon be the dominant strain. No more masks, no more limitations of any kind. 69.1% of the adult population has received at least one dose of Pfizer or Moderna. Pfizer being 96% effective in preventing hospitalization against the Delta variant according to this UK Public Health England study.
I’m going to continue to wear a mask though when in public. In fact, I’m going to permanently wear a mask from now on when in confined spaces with strangers. You be you though. Not a problem.
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It seems like the harder we work, the unluckier we get.
I’m sure it’s not supposed to work like that.
Fair enough, but this is Taiwan. It’s headless-chicken season over here.
It seems we’re not pulling in the same direction.
Also happy to see AZ is 92% effective against hospitalization. These stats should be pinned to the top , save people reading the conspiracy type stuff.
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Well, if you want to get technical, technically we also mutate. There’s no such thing as not mutating. Dogs, cats, cabbages - they all mutate. Technically, it’s wrong to say the sun rises in the East and sets in the West. I’m not interested in semantics and technicalities at the moment. My point is, the virus is meant to be stable. Until it conveniently isn’t.
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Source? All I vaguely remember is articles projecting that it would mutate, but not that quickly. And I certainly read about a sense that vaccines needed to be rolled out fast to reduce the risk of more dangerous mutations. I absolutely do not remember much talk along the lines of what you say here, that the virus would stay stable and wouldn’t change.
Do you have links to articles last year saying it wouldn’t mutate?
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Mostly heard it on the radio, but here’s a text link that folks can nitpick and use as a tool to attack my statement with. Fire away.
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Thanks for the link. I dunno, to me that article holds up pretty well with the current situation - note it’s very early, from March 2020. The virus “isn’t mutating quickly”: it doesn’t seem to be doing that, no. “That relative stability suggests the virus is less likely to become more or less dangerous as it spreads”: seems accurate - it’s debated whether or not the Delta variant is more dangerous once you’ve caught it, but the fact that it’s debated at all suggests it’s not that big a difference. The danger with Delta is how quickly it seems to spread.
Vaccines “would likely confer immunity for a long time”: so far, holding true. Vaccines are still pretty effective against Delta, depending on dosage. Long-term, no one knows yet, and that’s been an open question of concern for a while.
Whew, very wrong on the estimate of the time that “it will be at least a year to 18 months before one [EDIT: vaccine] becomes available.”
Later on, one scientist says “If it’s still around in a year, by that point we might have some diversity.” Yup! They called it!
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A somewhat reassuring tweet thread that appeared on my timeline today: Delta may be “only” 40% more transmissible than Alpha, versus feared 60%. And vaccines are working.
As is often happening with information from different countries, I’m getting confused about which vaccines people are talking about - UK sources seem to generally assume AZ, USA seems to generally assume NOT AZ.
But understanding a lot of this is way above my pay grade.
I think what you’re referring to is reports in early to mid-2020 that the observed rate of mutations was lower than expected for RNA viruses. At the time I remember this was ascribed to fundamental features of the virus/coronaviruses - specifically that they do some light proofreading during copying that reduces the rate. This is in comparison to “normal” zoonotic viruses, which undergo a process of “acclimatization” to the new host for better transmission, resulting in changes in the nucleic acid sequence that can be identified and tracked. This wasn’t so much the case for this particular coronavirus, which was taken to indicate a low mutation rate.
In the context of the lab leak theory that’s become more popular since then, though, that’s easier to rationalize. If the virus was already well adapted to humans by having been produced in humanized mice, mutations for higher transmission would be less necessary (in fact, that’s one of the pieces of evidence for the theory discussed in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists article that’s been posted here a few times and I can’t be bothered digging out from my phone - the virus was apparently already pretty well optimized for humans as soon as it emerged). Hence fewer variant sequences detected and the appearance of genetic stability.
That’s until you start distributing vaccines and taking other measures to limit spread, of course, at which point you’re selecting for mutations that overcome those measures for the continued spread of the virus.
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