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Medicine

WHO Says Delta is the Fastest and Fittest Covid Variant and Will 'Pick Off' Most Vulnerable (cnbc.com) 305

The highly contagious delta variant is the fastest and fittest coronavirus strain yet, and it will "pick off" the most vulnerable people, especially in places with low Covid-19 vaccination rates, World Health Organization officials warned Monday. From a report: Delta, first identified in India, has the potential "to be more lethal because it's more efficient in the way it transmits between humans and it will eventually find those vulnerable individuals who will become severely ill have to be hospitalized and potentially die," Dr. Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO's emergencies program, said during a news conference. Ryan said world leaders and public health officials can help defend the most vulnerable through the donation and distribution of Covid vaccines. "We can protect those vulnerable people, those frontline workers," Ryan said, "and the fact that we haven't, as Director-General (Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus) has said, again and again, is a catastrophic moral failure at a global level." The WHO said Friday that delta is becoming the dominant variant of the disease worldwide. The agency declared delta a "variant of concern" last month. A variant can be labeled as "of concern" if it has been shown to be more contagious, more deadly or more resistant to current vaccines and treatments, according to the health organization.
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WHO Says Delta is the Fastest and Fittest Covid Variant and Will 'Pick Off' Most Vulnerable

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  • Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday June 21, 2021 @03:34PM (#61507586)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by dmay34 ( 6770232 )

      We are going to be dealing with the long term consequences of four years of "America First" for generations.

    • by bhcompy ( 1877290 ) on Monday June 21, 2021 @03:43PM (#61507620)
      There are plenty of people self-excluding from vaccination regardless of where it's being distributed
      • by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 ) on Monday June 21, 2021 @04:46PM (#61507942)

        There are plenty of people self-excluding from vaccination regardless of where it's being distributed

        From Here Are The Biggest Groups That Are Still Refusing The Covid-19 Vaccine, Poll Finds [forbes.com]

        There were also discrepancies between unvaccinated respondents who said they would “definitely not” get the vaccine and those who just plan to “wait and see”: The “definitely not” group is overwhelmingly more white (70% of respondents), Republican (67%) and concentrated in the 30-49 age group (48%).

        The “wait and see” group, by contrast, is more evenly divided politically—39% are Democrats and 41% Republicans—and are slightly more likely to be Black or Hispanic (22% Black and 20% Hispanic, versus 5% and 11% in the “definitely not group”), though 72% are still between the ages of 18 and 49.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Ostracus ( 1354233 )

      To a degree although let's not underestimate just how big the task is towards immunizing an entire planet.

      But when the world is filled with information like this [youtu.be] it can be doubly hard towards fulfilling a task.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by jellomizer ( 103300 )

      Across the globe, the Response to COVID was just Idiots leading the stupid, and promoted by the numb nuts.

      There is actually a global partisan infighting and bickering and one ups man ship going on (well beyond Americans Liberal vs Conservative).
      When it Hit China first, China should has let the world know sooner, and be open about what it knows about it, its risks and hazards. Other countries should had came to aid China. However they basically politically correctly just pointed and laughed at look at the m

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Don't equivocate what the CCP did to disappear whistleblowers and reporters and deliberately mislead the world about the pandemic, to the actions and missteps taken by other countries.

        Remember too that any action taken by the US to help contain the virus, would be attacked by the partisan left because any loyalties they have will be to themselves, and any opportunity to score cheap political points will be taken advantage of. Even if it means stabbing the country in the back.

      • If you're talking about the US and UK, it wouldn't have mattered if China came clean earlier, because they did fuck all for 2-3 months *after* experts learned and advised them of the full danger. And a political game where you ban Chinese citizens while allowing in Americans direct from Wuhan without quarantine, testing, or even symptom screening and follow up calls, is not doing something, in case anyone is still using that line of bullshit.
      • which I think would also include isolating recent visors to/from those countries.

        That works well when you're an isolated country outside of its tourist season. When the virus was discovered in Italy it spread through two places: Ski resorts, and god damn Carnival. There is no more internationally significant superspreading event. People from the entire world were travelling to Italy for that event, and hopping from carnival celebration to carnival celebration throughout Europe.

        There was no isolating Italy. When it was discovered in Italy it was effectively discovered in Spain, Belgium,

    • by ArchieBunker ( 132337 ) on Monday June 21, 2021 @04:12PM (#61507756)

      The vaccine has been readily available for months. It's people of a certain political affiliation who keep turning it down.

      • There is overlap (Score:3, Informative)

        by lamer01 ( 1097759 )
        Political affiliation is not the signature marker here. Republicans = more self-reliant Democrats = more state-reliant Consequently, Democrats firmly believe what the state (as long as it is not Trump) says is good for them to do and Republicans do not. But, it is not because of party affiliation, it is because of the personality traits of self-reliance vs state-reliance. It just so happens that there is overlap.
      • The vaccine has been readily available for months. It's people of a certain political affiliation who keep turning it down.

        That may be true in the US, but it certainly isn't true in most of the world.

      • and I, for one, support the right of the Right, to die for their cause.

        I completely and fully support that.

        hell, I encourage it!

    • by phalse phace ( 454635 ) on Monday June 21, 2021 @04:19PM (#61507796)

      This is an entirely expected result of inequitable vaccine distribution.

      This is what you get and was entirely expected when millions of Hindus jump into a river [reuters.com] to take a bath together despite warnings.

      "Almost everyone forgot that there was ever corona," added the panel, headed by Chief Justice Vikram Nath.

      A full opening of the economy from last year's crippling lockdown, coupled with the mass religious festivals and political rallies in states heading to elections have fuelled the crisis. ... authorities appeared unwilling or unable to stop events that could lead to a calamitous spread of the disease.

    • by Anubis IV ( 1279820 ) on Monday June 21, 2021 @04:20PM (#61507802)

      By excluding some of the most populous areas from vaccination

      I agree with your point, but you seem to be suggesting India was excluded. They weren't. India has the largest vaccine manufacturing program in the world (pre-pandemic they produced 60% of the global supply), but rather than recognize the danger of their population and to their population, and then vaccinating them as quickly as possible, they put their people's lives at risk by exporting tens of millions of vaccine doses, leaving them without anyone vaccinated when delta hit. They're now dealing with the repercussions of that decision, with their people being the ones to pay the price.

      With a population of 1.3 billion people, do you want to guess how big India's largest order for vaccination doses was by the end of February 2021? 16 million. That's doses, mind you. They finally made a large-scale order in March, but it was only for 120 million doses. They followed it up in April with another order for 160 million, but those won't fully arrive until next month. This is far too little, too late, and it was a situation that might have been avoided had they vaccinated their own people with the supply they had readily available.

      Instead...well, this story is from a month-ish ago and I don't know how things have changed since then, but someone we know from India was saying that when a friend's husband died from COVID at 1am, the Mumbai authorities took the body and burned it in a mass pyre before 3am. Word on the street was that the reality of the situation was probably 4x worse than what was being reported in statistics. Take it with a heaping of salt, of course.

      Again, I agree that we need to be doing everything we can for other countries, if for no reason other than the selfish justification that they're a breeding ground for variants that can affect us, but India's issues in this regard are largely ones of their own making. They need help, of course, but there should also be a reckoning among those that allowed this to happen.

    • This is an entirely expected result of inequitable vaccine distribution (I will readily acknowledge that a vaccination distribution program that distributes evenly based on population would not necessarily have been the best response, but it likely would have been better than what we did).

      I read your post three times and couldn't figure out which political party you're blaming. Please be more specific.

      • by Jzanu ( 668651 )
        The answer is the BJP and its prophet Modi. India's homegrown fascist party that has been working for decades to kill all Indians while claiming to protect their interests against the amorphous "other" they blame for all social ills, including the ones caused directly by BJP party policies.
    • by Roger W Moore ( 538166 ) on Monday June 21, 2021 @04:43PM (#61507926) Journal

      By excluding some of the most populous areas from vaccination we created an environment ideal for selecting a more contagious virus.

      No area is being excluded. All the vaccines produced are being injected into humans who are vulnerable to COVID. As countries' vaccination rates are reaching saturation and there is spare supply those countries are redirecting their supply to others to help them - the US did this for Canada and others and now Canada is close to being in a position to pass it on and support the effort.

      Yes, wealthy countries were at the head of the queue for vaccines but, at the same time, those are the countries who are also producing the vaccines or producing the supplies needed to make the vaccines so securing their economies so that they can continue to do this makes a lot of sense. This is especially the case when you realize that those same economies are now going to be paying to buy the vaccines for the rest of the planet that would otherwise struggle to afford them.

      This might not be the global response you want but fortunately, the one we have is far more grounded in political and economic reality which makes it much more likely to actually work and be effective.

      • Yes, wealthy countries were at the head of the queue for vaccines but, at the same time, those are the countries who are also producing the vaccines or producing the supplies needed to make the vaccines so securing their economies so that they can continue to do this makes a lot of sense.

        Look up the world's vaccine producers and you will see India very very high on the list. Look up the world's wealthy countries and you won't.

        • Ok here it is [who.int] although I could not find a list ranked by number of doses. As you can see the vast majority of that list consists of wealthy countries. It is also worth pointing out the while India certainly does produce a lot of vaccines it has currently banned the export of all covid vaccines meaning that currently the vast majority of vaccines circulating outside India almost certainly are being produced in wealthy, or at least reasonably wealthy, countries.
    • This is an entirely expected result of inequitable vaccine distribution

      What difference does it make who is vaccinated first?

  • And that's why you should avoid unnecessary trips.

    Since suddenly you'd end up with a mutation causing serious trouble making the current waves seem insignificant.

  • by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Monday June 21, 2021 @03:57PM (#61507672)

    I fly Southwest.

  • by ironicsky ( 569792 ) on Monday June 21, 2021 @04:59PM (#61508024) Homepage Journal

    Seriously. Play the pandemic online game, the one where you build a virus to try to wipe out humanity.

    What is the first thing the game does to prevent spreading? Close the borders.

    Something so bloody simple, and yet international and regional travel is still allowed.

    Close the fucking borders. Between countries. Between States and between provinces. Just shut it down...

    The economy will bounce back eventually. The lives lost due to profits over people mentality will not.

    Just shut it down.

    • by lorinc ( 2470890 )

      Sure, if it works in a video game, it must work in the real world, right?

      Shutting the border only delays the inevitable by a few days/weeks. Either you close everything, all airports, all maritime transport, prevent all people from passing the border, including patrolling huge terrestrial borders, every fucking single thing should be stopped; or there will be a guy with the virus that will pass and spread it at some point. But your country cannot survive without global trade. It doesn't even have enough che

      • by Anubis IV ( 1279820 ) on Monday June 21, 2021 @06:52PM (#61508432)

        Sure, if it works in a video game, it must work in the real world, right?

        The developer of Plague, Inc., which closely follows Pandemic's gameplay, gave a talk at the CDC back in 2013, and even incorporated a number of things they learned from the CDC back into the game. Likewise, a large number of organizations conducted epidemiological studies into the Corrupted Blood incident that occurred in World of Warcraft [wikipedia.org] back in 2005. Even the CDC reached out to Blizzard to get data about the incident.

        So while you can't assume that every game maps neatly back to reality, you shouldn't be so dismissive either.

        And yes, even if closing a border only buys you a few weeks before the onset or a mass outbreak, those few weeks can be enough time to see what isn't working elsewhere, educate people appropriately, write up and put into effect new processes, switch manufacturing lines to medicine/PPEs, and distribute supplies. Result: the curve is flatter, your medical system doesn't get overloaded as easily, and your economy isn't as impacted.

        Also worth noting: if you do see infections, studies from the 1918 Spanish Flu indicate that major US cities that shut down earlier and stayed locked down for longer were consistently the least economically impacted in the long-run, as measured by the time it took them to recover to their pre-pandemic state. As it turns out, the permanent loss of lifetimes of productivity/sales resulting from the deaths of employees/customers has an ongoing cost that takes far more time to recoup than a few months of reduced productivity and sales resulting from a lockdown.

      • Sure, if it works in a video game, it must work in the real world, right?

        Actually it does work in the real world. See NZ and Australia as examples.

    • Oddly Plague Inc: Evolved [steampowered.com] approaches the issue from an opposite angle.

    • Seriously. Play the pandemic online game, the one where you build a virus to try to wipe out humanity.

      What is the first thing the game does to prevent spreading? Close the borders.

      Something so bloody simple, and yet international and regional travel is still allowed.

      Close the fucking borders. Between countries. Between States and between provinces. Just shut it down...

      The economy will bounce back eventually. The lives lost due to profits over people mentality will not.

      Just shut it down.

      Economies are pretty damn interconnected now. How do you get food to the supermarkets? Medications to the hospitals and drug stores? I'm sure there's some regional stockpiles, but for a real border closure you're talking some major, major disruptions. And those disruptions don't ease off as time goes on, if anything they get worse as the stockpiles of imported goods dry up.

      Island nations can manage this because their import/export is done through international shipping and is a lot easier to keep track of,

  • No one would hope to run a company, a lab or a government department without measuring successes and failures.

    Yet organisations like WHO and the CDC (and SAGE in the UK) continually utter the most exaggerated and frightening warnings - which mostly come to nothing.

    Dr Ferguson and his team at Imperial have made completely wrong predictions five times in a row; yet no one seems to notice, care, or take any appropriate steps.

    Isn't the saying "three strikes and you're out"? For senior scientists dealing with su

    • by Jzanu ( 668651 )
      For a metric to be meaningful you have to measure the goal of an organization against its performance. In this case the goals "Did a preventable disease kill even more millions or billions of people without any warning?" In that case the WHO has succeeded admirably throughout its entire history. Scale up the diseases of humanities past to understand what would have happened without a monitoring group prompting organized governmental responses. The same for the US CDC, restricted to its territories.
    • Bull shit. STFU.

      https://theferret.scot/fact-ch... [theferret.scot]

      • by Cederic ( 9623 )

        As always, a fact check site that happily ignores the facts.

        For instance, Ferguson was part of the team that produced the erroneous computer model that was used to justify the illegal slaughter of millions of healthy animals in the Foot & Mouth outbreak.

        That the fact checker couldn't find the evidence merely shows their incompetence in researching, not that the facts are flawed.

  • by quietwalker ( 969769 ) <pdughi@gmail.com> on Monday June 21, 2021 @10:15PM (#61508724)

    ... I say, thank you, bring it on!

    Look, I'm not saying you kill all the folks who refuse to mask up and get a vaccine. Just enough to adjust the voting blocks, and the majority of elected officials in state government.

    And for my third wish, take the racists too.

"Experience has proved that some people indeed know everything." -- Russell Baker

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