How well the variant spreads elsewhere might depend on factors such as vaccination and prior infection rates, says Aris Katzourakis, an expert in viral evolution at the University of Oxford, UK. “If you throw it into the mix in a highly vaccinated population that has given up on other control measures, it might have the edge there.”
:thonk:
Edit: The phrase "an engineered version of HIV that uses SARS-CoV-2’s spike protein to infect cells" REALLY doesn't sit well with me.
implying the Anglosphere is "highly" vaccinated
:society:
Fair, but I'm thinking of flyover feral hog country, where you're lucky to see > 40% in some places, and you have a disproportionate amount of rabid anti-vax and anti-maskers. I really wish I didn't have to live around these reactionary fuckers and their death drive. At least I was already a socially distant weirdo shut-in before all this kicked off...
Yeah, my takeaway TL;DR from the article is "more transmissible/infectious than Delta, but it's too soon to tell re: severity/lethality and hospitalization rates due to a lack of data."
According to 90% of the comments on youtube videos about this topic it's just a cold, a trick to sell vaccines, and "let's go brandon".
A mild but more infectious version? I've played pandemic, I know what comes next
Yeah, but two years in, they've definitely got a travel ban in place by now
