How Concerned Should CT Be About the Delta Plus Variant?

Danbury CT

06 August, 2021

8:38 PM

Description

CONNECTICUT — The coronavirus delta variant now accounts for all new COVID-19 variant cases in the state, a startling trajectory upwards from just 3.1 percent of them, recorded the last week in April. Given that it is about 55 percent more transmissible than the first variant, the alpha that shut down the UK earlier this year, how concerned should you be? Although many Americans have revealed a certain late-night monster-movie fan-girling fascination for a buffed-up mutant strain of a disease that is Resistant to Science, the coronavirus delta variant isn't it, so save your popcorn. The COVID-19 vaccines, including the single-dose from Johnson & Johnson, are as effective against the delta variant as they are against all the other versions of the virus currently in Connecticut. Nationwide, the delta variant accounts for 83.4 percent of new variant cases, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Buried beneath much of the feverish talk about the delta ascendancy is the news that the COVID-19-associated death rate in Connecticut has largely stalled. State agencies properly prioritized the fragile elderly population for the vaccine as soon as it became available, and young people are simply far less likely to die from it. Nationwide, more than 99 percent of those currently hospitalized with COVID-19 are unvaccinated, and the infection rates are 90 percent below what they were at the January peak of the 3rd wave of coronavirus. In Connecticut, the daily positivity rate reached its 3rd wave high of 10.72 percent in January. On Thursday, the number was 2.72 percent, after hovering under 1 percent for the first half of the summer. More good news? Those who have contracted COVID-19 are likely to be protected against reinfection for at least a year, according to a new study published in the journal Nature. Researchers found that getting vaccinated after infection augmented the activity of neutralizing antibodies needed to repel the virus and prevent infection with variants by 50-fold. So at this point, COVID-19 is largely a "pandemic of the unvaccinated," as Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz recently described it, but the number of unvaccinated is not a trivial one. In Connecticut, only 63.6 percent of residents are fully vaccinated, per data made available by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Friday afternoon. Nationwide, the numbers are worse. The number of fully vaccinated Americans has held at around 49-50 percent for the past few weeks, according to the CDC. The anxious drive to vaccinate everyone is less about the known delta variant, as it is the lesser known variants which have yet to make much of a dent in the U.S. The ominously named delta plus variant, also known as B.1.617.2.1 or AY.1, was first detected in the U.K. in March. The U.K.'s version of our CDC declared it a variant of concern on June 11, and public health officials in India followed 11 days later. Since then, 197 cases have been reported, in 11 countries. There is not a lot of conclusive data about the delta plus. All indicators so far show it to be at least as transmissible as the delta, but there is nothing definitive to indicate it is more so. There has been just one death to date, an 80-year-old woman with pre-existing conditions in India. Researchers in that country have been studying the effectiveness of the vaccines on the new variant and say they will release their findings next week. Virologists are also concerned about the lambda variant. It began circulating last August in Peru, where it has become the dominant variant. The GISAID variant database indicates there are more than 1,000 cases of the lambda variant reported in the U.S., and more than 4,000 cases worldwide. Here in the U.S., it has been reported in both Texas and Louisiana. Peru took a beating from the lambda as the Chinese vaccine they were using to inoculate residents proved ineffective against it. The Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson jabs that are administered in Connecticut are cut from a different jib, however, and may ultimately prove effective against the upstart — testing is still in preliminary phases.