Quote:
Originally Posted by jfman
So basically it needs to be able to do to Delta what Delta did to Alpha?
It doesn’t strike me as particularly unconcerning, given infinite time and billions of opportunities against weakening efficacy (all vaccines).
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sort of.
But Delta is fundamentally a more transmissible Alpha, which is only concerning to a certain extent - if the disease is the same, but just spreads quicker/easier, then that just means if you need to slow it down you need to do more.
There's slight immunity escape too but what you'd probably need is for something like Delta and Beta to fuse which would give the transmissibility and vaccine escape. But given that this would be a logical next stage in the virus, there has to be some reason why it hasn't done this yet (and why in these cases Beta has just lost out) - probably because there's only so many big mutations the spike proteins can take before they don't actually do their job (don't forget this is how the virus enters its code into cells) and in these cases the choice between transmissibility and other issues seems to always go with transmissibility.
It seems possible we won't see it - we probably would have by now. Everything just seems to be getting more transmissible and less asymptomatic but milder symptoms more like a cold, which could well be how the coronaviruses which caused colds ended up that way.