"a biologist in training" means they've thought about taking biology 101 in college next semester
Your concern is definitely understandable and I think most of us have had similar worries after reading things like this. I do think that the collapse subreddit tends to err on the side of doomerism though, and I try not to put too much stock into uncredited text like that post.
The new mutations put the R0 value well into the R0= 6.0+ range. That’s smallpox contagious - that’s society ending values right there.
Smallpox ended society? Yeah, I'm going to go with doomer shit.
Not an epidemiologist, but my understanding is that the reason Covid-19 was so bad, and the vaccines took as long as they did, was because there was no vaccine for anything close to it before (it's similarish to the common cold). A mutated strain, even if it makes it more infections, is still relatively better than a wholly new disease because the existing vaccines might already be partially effective, and will be the basis for new vaccines to attack the specific strain. This means that even if the current speed of vaccine development is outpaced by mutation, that gap will close as vaccine development for specific strains will be quicker now that there is a Coronavirus vaccine. People tend to get flu shot's once a year, and I imagine worst case scenario, people will have to get Coronavirus vaccines around the same time.
