Inside the Delta variant: what countries need to know to tackle it

As time passed since the start of the pandemic and the original SARS-CoV-2 virus began to mutate, two questions arose that scientists struggled to answer: Whether each new variant is more contagious and the symptoms it can cause are more severe.

but what does that mean? When a variant is more contagious, the number of infections increases, especially in the unvaccinated, and when a variant is more severe, it causes more severe symptoms in more people. They contract the virus and lead to a higher percentage of cases leading to hospitalization or death.

With the appearance in India of the Delta variant in late 2020 and its rapid expansion, doubts have arisen about its contagiousness and severity. of the images it provokes. But sometimes the increase in the number of cases leads to an increase in the crude number of hospitalizations and deaths, doctor Robert Wachter of the University of California at San Francisco told The New York Times.

The press and some experts qualify the new variant as “worse”, “riskier” or “more dangerous”, but this leads to confusion about the difference between contagion and seriousness. “Part of the problem is the vagueness of the language,” said Rebecca Wurtz, an infectious disease expert at the University of Minnesota, as published today by The New York Times.

The difference between the two concepts is important. While a new variant is not actually more serious, it does not pose a greater threat to a typical person who contracts COVID-19, and those vaccinated would remain protected. For children too young to be vaccinated, severe symptoms of COVID-19 would remain extremely rare, if not rarer than other everyday risks, such as car travel or other health problems.

After the Alpha variant started to spread from the UK at the end of last year, many people speculated that it was more contagious and more serious. However, the data quickly told a different story: Alpha appears to be only more contagious.

History may now repeat itself with Delta, according to the NYT report. It’s significantly more contagious even than the Alpha variant in almost every way, but it doesn’t appear to be more serious, based on the data available to date.

However, this data can change and is not accurate, as you may find limited statistics that point both ways, some suggesting that Delta is more severe, others that it is just as severe, and also those that say that it is less severe than previous versions. virus. But most of the evidence shows no significant change. “From what everyone can tell, Delta is not more dangerous in the sense that it causes worse illness,” Wurtz said. “He’s a cunning opportunist, not a man of chaos,” he noted..

Janet Baseman, epidemiologist at the University of Washington, he said for his part “Not” having seen “convincing evidence that the Delta variant is more severe”, while doctor Paul Sax del Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston noted that “This feeling of a greater severity of the disease is more anecdotal than motivated by real data.” In turn, Eric Topol of Scripps Research said, “I don’t think kids get any sicker.”

Dr Aaron Richterman, University of Pennsylvania, said, for his part, that in his opinion it is not necessary that due to the circulation of Delta, vaccinated parents behave any differently than a few weeks ago. Richterman has young children and his family has not changed his behavior, he said.

A good way to understand the Delta variant is to look at England, where it has been circulating widely since May, longer than in the United States. If Delta was more severe than previous versions of the virus, the percentage of cases leading to hospitalization or death is expected to increase, but this has not happened.

The average severity of COVID-19 declined in the spring, thanks to England’s mass vaccination program, as vaccines have been shown to reduce severe cases of the disease. Since the spring, gravity has remained in the same narrow range. Statistics would have shown the increase in severe cases since May or June had Delta been more severe.

In many ways, this image shouldn’t surprise us. It is very rare for a variant of the virus to be more contagious and more serious, according to the NYT report, despite which it should not be ignored that the Delta variant is a problem, even in countries with higher levels of vaccines.

For the unvaccinated elderly, COVID-19 doesn’t have to be more severe to be a deadly threat. The increased contagiousness of the Delta variant has led to a sudden increase in cases in much of the world, putting unvaccinated adults at increased risk of contracting it.

As a result, vaccination has become even more important than it already was. In the United States, the regions most skeptical about vaccination, which tend to be politically conservative regions, are now experiencing larger epidemics. In many other countries, where people often have not had the opportunity to get vaccinated, cases are also on the rise. Yet the global mass immunization program is advancing with agonizing slowness.

As has often happened with COVID-19, the story is not easy. The Delta mutation is a threatening development in some places and may make little difference in others.. “Delta is creating a lot of noise” in the United States, Bill Hanage, a Harvard epidemiologist, told The Times, “but I don’t think it’s fair to sound the alarm,” he said.

The Delta mutation widens the gap between what the doctor Anthony Fauci, Chief Advisor to the United States Government on Epidemiological Issues, called the “two Americas” which are divided into vaccinated and unvaccinated.

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