Tuesday, August 31, 2021

Delta Sigma Phi

5000 members of this crowd of 53,000 in Cornwall tested positive afterwards — and with a trendy new sub-cepa of Delta which has been dubbed the 'Festival' variant.

I'm thinking that If we can have sub-variants with descriptive, even geographical names, it sort of defeats the object of the whole Greek alphabet lark. Though I suppose there is the danger that all emerging covid threats start to sound like frat houses.

The Duchy is reportedly now host to eight out of the top ten covid hotspots in England.



Such a gathering strikes me as an ill-conceived idea this summer, even for the young and vaccinated. Yet when I was in Manhattan in June this was going on in the lobby and lounge of my hotel...



It possibly adds some fuel to the suggestion in the NYT today that some of the apparent waning effectiveness in vaccine protection can be put down to socio-demographic factors and associated risk-on behaviours.

That did appear to me to be a potential issue with the recent data dump from Israel.

Not only, as I mentioned here, the fact that those with strong natural immunity inevitably represented a sub-set of survivors, but also the possibility that the groups being measured feature conflicting age-groups.

However, it may well be that the key to understanding this is that more affluent Israelis, who were over-represented in the early jabbings, have since reverted to a pattern of behaviour which possibly doesn't work out in the best interests of the whole society.



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