Messages about COVID19 - Delta Variant
A close friend of mine living in Ukraine, keeps me updated on the response people have toward the virus. Toward the end of Christmas this past year, she contracted the virus and had a second occurrence a few months later. This is an email that I sent to her today discussing the new variants...
Hello Ира,
I watched a video by a virologist who was not happy with how the health officials delivered the vaccines.
Your body recognizes the full virus because you have antibodies from when you were infected. If the virus has a slight mutation of one part of its surface, your body can still react to the other parts of its surface.
In the case of most of the vaccinations, they followed a different strategy. People received two injections targeting a single spike protein spaced over weeks or months. From the first injection until the second injection, the virus had trillions of opportunities to mutate that single spike protein. The Delta variant has 13 mutations in the gene encoding for the virus’ spike protein. Here is the effectiveness of the two most common vaccines in North America against the Delta variant.
In the people who have a single dose of AstraZeneca and Pfizer, there is only a 33% effectiveness against the new strain. For the people who had received a second dose within two weeks, effectiveness rose to 60% and 88%.
While receiving a second dose after two weeks was the prescribed procedure, this did not happen generally. In Canada, the health officials decided that people could receive the following amount up to four months later. In my parents' case, they got their booster a couple of months later. Oddly they were given the first shot with one and the second of the other. I haven't bothered reading how either vaccine works in detail, so I cannot comment on this.
So the best-case scenario is that the new Delta Variant will have the ability to mutate in 12% of the population. We now see there is a Delta Plus variant.
On Tuesday, India said more than 40 cases of Delta Plus (officially called B.1.617.2.1) were found across three states—Maharashtra, Kerala, and Madhya Pradesh. A group of labs in India have studied the new variant and report that it appears to have three troubling characteristics: increased transmissibility, better ability to infect cells in the lungs, and a potential for higher resistance to vaccines or immunity gained through prior infection.
Source: Medical Press - JUNE 28, 2021
You can see why the Virologist is concerned.
David
As I was gathering my thoughts on this post, I started researching data to do a comparison between the two countries, Canada and Ukraine. I thought that it warranted a second post.