29, rippling out across the Twitterverse. The preprint didn't gather much momentum until a Twitter thread by a former Harvard epidemiologist went viral on Aug. Preprints are research articles that haven't yet undergone a peer review process. The strain, currently dubbed C.1.2, was first detected in South Africa in May and in the last week has gathered significant attention because of a preprint study by South African researchers published Aug. "There is no evidence it is particularly transmissible, and it has not been flagged as a variant under interest so far," says Francois Balloux, a computational biologist at University College London. There's no doomsday variant (we don't name variants this way), and there's little evidence this new mutant strain is worse than delta. But the stories left out valuable context.
They shouted that this new variant was "worse than delta." They warned of concerning mutations. So when I saw headlines about a so-called "doomsday variant" of the coronavirus earlier this week, I felt deflated. But the emergence of delta has concerned scientists, experts and the public alike - it has inspired a feeling of powerlessness and uncertainty about just how long the pandemic will be with us. In the face of rising cases, the jabs have been able to stem the flow of hospitalizations and death. In places with good vaccine coverage, like the UK, Iceland and Israel, delta has triggered a surge in daily case numbers.įortunately, though delta is more transmissible than previous variants, vaccines still protect us from its worst effects. Its rapid transmission has seen it run rampant in places with low vaccination rates, like Australia, forcing half a nation into extended lockdown. The delta variant of coronavirus has forced a rapid rethink on the pandemic endgame.
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