does anyone have recent excess death statistics, most local areas say something like 500 cases. like i see thousands of people running around at pride with no masks.... i feel like people are insane

  • PlantsRstillCool [des/pair]
    ·
    4 years ago

    I wonder if the variants will only get slowly worse. It won't be a terrible variant all the sudden but just a slow degredation of the vaccines effectiveness as new variants slowly evolve.

    • SolidaritySplodarity [they/them]
      ·
      4 years ago

      It's very hard to predict. The only certainty is that high infection rates dramatically increase the chances of escape variants.

    • invalidusernamelol [he/him]
      ·
      4 years ago

      Yeah, I think boosters will help initially, but after a while people will get tired of those too and we'll have another 2020.

      • SolidaritySplodarity [they/them]
        ·
        4 years ago

        The delta variant already did this.

        There is a strong selective pressure to escape the vaccines, it's just a matter of how large the space of functional escape mutations is and how quickly it can be explored. That space is of unknown size, but the speed at which it can be explored is directly proportional to population size, i.e. infection rates. In addition, the larger the population, the more likely that slightly deleterious mutations will survive long enough for a new optimum to be reached in subsequent mutations.

        If every country had followed China's example, we'd at least have a low rate of new allele generation, possibly even eradicated it by now. Instead, we're playing with fire.

        Source: took virology and lots of pop gen.