I think the most important and future-impacting news come from Israel.
Translated: (Currently, with their >50% pop. vaccinated, and RT = 0.5) 100 people infect 50, who infect 25, who infect 12, who infect 2, who infect 1, who eventually no longer infect.
And if no one infects no one, that pretty much means that SARS-CoV-2 will get eradicated (i.e. the same fate of smallpox).
@usher 🤞🏻 hopefully we'll be able to attend events similar to the one in your pic above without any concerns about covid within the very near future (of course depending on the country one's in; for us European it'll take a few months longer than our American friends I guess)
@DeWayfarer I doubt that back in the days they could sequence smallpox and determine how much it mutated, honestly. Every virus mutates, their reproductive cycle can be summed up in:
1. One (or more) viral particle/s enters a cells 2. The cell is hijacked in a way that it starts producing copies of the original viral particles 3. The cell dies/bursts releasing several orders of magnitude more viral particles than the one/s that hijacked it in the point above 4. Part of these are expelled, infecting other hosts and part remain within the same subjects, infecting other cells, in both cases restarting the process from point 1
During this process, it happens that random errors occur during the copy of the viral genome. Said errors result in more or less slightly mutated variants of the original virus, and are essential for the evolutionary process of the virus itself. If no mutation/variant ever occurred, the virus wouldn't exist in the first place (or at the very least, would've been a problem since long before 2020).
That said, in Israel they've sequenced multiple samples of these mutations, so it's not that they're a magic place in which said mutations haven't been found as of yet, and the Rt number is still going lower and lower. As you said, if the Pfizer vaccine would've selected for rarer mutations and if these mutations were resistant to the immunity acquired from Pfizer/BNT's shot, the Rt number nor the hospitalisation rate wouldn't be going down (rather, we'd start seeing more and more cases of people infected with the Brazilian or whatever other variant).
It's still good to keep a cautionary approach of course, but that doesn't mean that we'll necessarily be dealing with vaccine-resistant mutations as soon as we reach a certain vaccination threshold. And Israel real-world data seems to suggest that, for now, there's no reason of concern.
In Brazil vaccinations are in very small numbers. So more variations are likely to be coming out of such countries. Therefore we all (the whole world) will have be to be on the lookout for them. Problem is these variations could be anywhere around the world.
Once again their is a reason why Dr Fauci is very much concerned here. He hasn't back down on his stance. I am certain he knows about this Israeli data long before any of us had!
@DeWayfarer I think Dr. Fauci is playing cautious, I myself am someone who adopts the "always expect the worst outcome to happen from any non-competely controllable event/situation" approach in my profession (although I'm in a different field). There is also a greater-than-zero chance that vaccine-resistant mutations might arise later from one of those countries were vaccination rates are low and the spread is high such as indeed Brazil. That however doesn't mean those scenarios will inevitably happen, they're just hypotheses for now.
@DeWayfarer I've been quite pessimistic (and rightfully so, it seems) since the very beginning of this thing, especially considering it hit here sooner than almost everywhere else (minus for China and Iran), and I firmly believe we'd probably be in a (much) better situation now if the great majority of governments took the situation more seriously early on, which would include taking an "expect the worst" approach. But I think these first Israeli data look quite promising and we might realistically see the end of the tunnel sooner than we expect, too. 🤞🏻
