A new study has highlighted how worrying the delta version of Sars-CoV-2 is for its added ability to infect people and evade an immune response. The study by researchers from India and other countries and published in the journal Nature found that viruses of the B.1.617.2 lineage were eight times more likely than the original to survive vaccine-induced immunity. It is also six times more likely to be re-infected in people who have recovered from COVID.
These startling figures offer an explanation for the horrific start to summer this year. Our second wave of infection was mostly killed by Delta, although our slackness on genome tracking had left us unaware of it at the time. Other findings suggest that even greater vaccination coverage will not help end the pandemic, given that high delta viral loads are found even among vaccinations, meaning that jabs may not reduce transmission as rapidly as We hoped they would. Thus COVID is set to be endemic, and we may have to leave eradication as a near term goal. Vaccines reduce the severity of delta infections and, therefore, save lives. So it assures that our jab rate has improved recently.
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