RE: To be fair, there is an uptick in deaths and hospitalizations and positive tests even though the number of tests being performed is way down
I ask the question because I want to know how serious this variant is compared to the original that cause our nationwide lockdown.
Based on what you are telling me ( again IF TRUE ).
1) Delta is MORE TRANSMISSIVE than the original.
2) The lethality and seriousness is comparable to the original ( I don’t know what you mean by uptick, how HIGH is the hospitalization uptick, how high is the death uptick? Is it as serious as the original enough to justify lockdowns? I ask because the Aussies are doing it even as we speak )
3) Delta seems to be able to penetrate the immune defenses of even those vaccinated.
How can we call this scaremongering when by your description ( again IF TRUE ), it looks more serious and infectious than the original?
There is an uptick, but nothing comparable to what we saw in 2020. It’s just a reversal of the trend. Maybe too soon to call it a wave. AFAIK, it’s not a big uptick.
What the media is telling us is that this is because Delta is more easily transmissible, and it is hitting unvaxxed people. But that, at least to the anecdotal information I have been able to gather, may not be entirely true as I said Israel is seeing breakthrough cases. It may be that Pfizer vaccine is less effective at Delta than the others. Or it may be that these vaccines don’t last very long. As another freeper reminded me, flu shots don’t last long and influenza mutates constantly and every year a new strain or mutation spreads easily. Plus, they have been talking about “booster” shots since before the vaccines were released, so they know something about their longevity and efficacy that we don’t.
I have also seen information that while Delta is more transmissible, it may be less dangerous. This is all just pieced together from various sources I’ve read over the last few weeks.
Lockdowns don’t seem to be helping at all in Europe or Australia. There is no real way to prove whether it helped here in the USA at all. I suspect that the total infected is more than double the official number; it’s just that those other half of cases were never tested. Which suggests that the cases were either mild or unsymptomatic, so the infected person never bothered to get tested. Red Cross reports that 20% of blood samples by unvaxxed blood donors showed antibody presence but official stats say only about 10% of the population was infected. Make of that what you will.
I don’t expect we’ll have another lockdown. I think Americans are over it. My opinion only, it was one of several grave errors in judgement in handling the pandemic. By flattening the curve so to speak we just elongated the curve. People will get sick, many will die. Many did anyway with lockdowns. IMO, there is a rationale to debate whether we should just let nature take its course. It will be sad and harmful but the sooner we get over it the sooner we can get on with life. The other grave error was not spending any money to study potential off the shelf treatments. There is ‘anecdotal’ evidence that either HCQ or Ivermectin, plus Zinc, D3 and antibiotics are effective. Maybe not a magic bullet but what is? But we will never know because they literally put the kibosh on any talk of that, and never even tried to do a large random controlled trial.