Even though more of the new cases are Delta, so far, there are not many more new cases in total. Its still low.
We are pretty flat at between 10-15,000 new cases per day reported. The old estimate from from CDC had been about 2.7 unreported, for each reported, so call it about 50,000 actual new infections per day.
That is even slower than the currently lame vaccination rates, of a few hundred thousand first shots per day, and would take a long time to get around to everybody. I just think it will beat out Lambda, in the USA.
Delta is already widely distributed, and has the transmissibility boost. If it can’t muster an outbreak against our current levels of herd immunity, I doubt that Lambda would be able to either. If Delta can muster a last hurrah flare up of cases (another wave), then I think it could well burn through the available unvaccinated supply, before Lambda could get its boots on in the USA.
By the end of this month, it should be clear if Delta will flare up the total numbers, or just sputter along like now. We already may have enough immunity in the population to prevent big outbreaks.
Eventually however, over the years, almost all of the unvaccinated will eventually catch a case of some strain of COVID-19.
The big wild card is how much natural immunity is already out there.
As for the “vaccines causing mutations” claims, a recent study shows just the opposite. Vaccines reduce mutations.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.01.21259833v1.full-text
” Prospective validation of these macroscale evolutionary patterns using clinically annotated SARS-CoV-2 whole genome sequences confirms that vaccine breakthrough patients indeed harbor viruses with significantly lower diversity in known B cell epitopes compared to unvaccinated COVID-19 patients “
“This study presents the first known evidence that COVID-19 vaccines are fundamentally restricting the evolutionary and antigenic escape pathways accessible to SARS-CoV-2.”
I know, I know, the Mayo Clinic is “Deep Pharma” and we should wait for Dr Tenpenny or Johnheretohelp.