SARS-CoV-2 Thoughts

Vaccinated people infected by Delta are more likely to be hospitalized than unvaccinated people by Alpha. The statistical power of this study isn't great, but it implies that vaccinated people are more likely to need hospitalization. Ware the confounders. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(21)00475-8/fulltext Reading the full paper, we find 1.9% of unvaccinated Alpha infectees required hospital admission. 2.2% of unvaccinated versus 2.3% of vaccinated Delta infectees required it, and 3.4% of vaccinated Alpha infectees required it. Thus, strangely, vaccination appears in these findings to increase the risk of hospitalization or emergency treatment required. The statistical power of these findings isn't very great because of too few hospital admissions amongst vaccinated infectees, and bear in mind we vaccinated people at higher underlying risk first and more thoroughly and the propensity of people who have been vaccinated to also be more l...

SARS-CoV-2 is known to be a seasonal virus because the amount of viral transmission depends critically on the temperature . There are higher loads of viral inoculum that are transmitted greater distances when it's cold and absolute humidity is lower, and people are more likely to gather inside together for warmth. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2021.650493/full This is true of all strains, and we are entering autumn with a higher case count than we had last year. Also, last winter, Alpha was dominant nearly entirely alone, and it's not antigenically very distant from the original S protein. Instead, today, we now have many antigenically distant strains and variants of concern(VoCs). Check the dot plot for cross-immunoreactivity between strains in the following article. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/08/new-sars-cov-2-variants-have-changed-pandemic-what-will-virus-do-next Through those two factors, we should see new domestic highs in case co...