by Bob Williams, Stevensville
Please, people who know about SARS CoV-2 Delta causing Covid-19, help us get sufficiently informed about the dangerous mutations in the Delta variant.
Looks like in February of this year, Delta caused the second Covid-19 outbreak in India.
Then the third Covid outbreak in the United Kingdom.
And now Delta is causing the Covid-19 outbreak in the USA, also Montana, and may have hit, but not been genome sequenced, here in the Bitterroot Valley.
What are the public need to know Delta mutations? I read that a few of them alter the protein building blocks that makes those darn double duty spikes the grab, then jab, our cells, and that one of the Delta mutations lessens the ability of our immune system to seek and find Delta variant SARS CoV-2 molecules. That combination sounds doubly dangerous. Even more so because early Delta Covid-19 symptoms are mild, and may not be noticed.
I read that the Delta variant is about half again as contagious as the Alpha variant.
(Which was maybe twice as contagious as the original SARS CoV-2 virus from Wuhan, China.)
I read that Delta is much more virulent than was the Alpha variant. And that Delta victims are two times more likely to be hospitalized than were Alpha variant victims.
The public needs reliable information about Delta.
For instance, when do Delta carriers shed the spike covered virus? Is it true that an average unvaccinated adult Delta carrier sheds a lot more virus than does an average fully vaccinated adult Delta carrier?
That’s critically important information when looking at the school year and noticing that in the USA, in July, about 20% of the daily new confirmed cases of Covid-19 were in children below the age of 12. Now we read that 26% of the new daily confirmed cases of Covid-19 are in children below the age of 12.