They claim the delta variant is the most transmissible found to date: is 10 seconds enough to get infected?

That the variant of SARS-CoV-2 that emerged in India – called delta then by the World Health Organization (WHO) – this is undoubtedly worrying. From the first cases recorded in the world, specialists have warned against its “strong contagiousness”.

Now, Australian experts have let their people know that this mutation can spread during a brief encounter that lasts between five and ten seconds.

Paradoxically, delta was born almost without the health authorities realizing it: while in December 2020 the world was looking towards the United Kingdom and a mutation emerging there was discovered which quickly spread throughout Europe, at the same time, it went unnoticed that in a region of India, with almost double the population of the United Kingdom, the variant now called delta was detected, the dangerousness of which was only known when it was became dominant, already in the boreal spring of 2021.

Thus, at the highest transmission capacity, The variant then added its ability to evade the antibodies generated by the vaccine, which was found to be up to eight times that of the original coronavirus, according to a recent in vitro study.

Even like that, Experts assure that vaccines continue to be effective in preventing hospitalizations and deaths from this version of SARS-CoV-2, although for this it is recommended that the vaccination be complete.

The news is now that Jeannette Young, Queensland, Australia Head of Health, He argued that “to cause contagion with the delta variant, only very fleeting contact is needed”. “It seems like five or ten seconds of close contact can be a problem.”, he claimed.

In Australia, they alerted the population after detecting infections almost instantaneously, within seconds. One took place in a Sydney shopping center and was performed by an infected person simply by meeting a person infected with the delta variant. This same person seems to have also infected, on entering or leaving a cafeteria, a woman who was sitting on the terrace of the premises. They just had to pass each other, according to the security cameras of the place.

For the doctor Kerry Chant, New South Wales State Public Health Officer, this type of contagion is “appallingly short-lived”. “People are face to face but only for a moment,” said Chant, who is also studying two cases of similar contagion.

One of the hypotheses of these fleeting contagions is that aerosols of the virus could have concentrated before long enough that a person passing by and taking air to breathe just then could be infected.

Studies carried out so far have calculated that delta is more than twice as contagious as the original version of the original Wuhan virus and between 40 and 60% more than alpha, the variant initially detected in the UK. In addition, in a survey of 100 health workers in India, it was found that the viral load in the upper respiratory tract is much higher than that of other variants. This could partly explain these express contagions detected in Australia.

The new challenge posed by this variant, in addition to the apparent greater resistance to vaccines and its greater contagiousness, is given by the difficulty of following the close contacts. By definition, a person is considered to have had risky contact when they have been within a meter, for more than 15 minutes, and without a mask, with a person who has subsequently tested positive for COVID- 19. If the immediate contagion of the delta mutation is confirmed, everything indicates that no one will be able to say how many people he crossed in a day.

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