“each infection provides billions of opportunities for a mutation that makes things worse for the rest of us.”
The possibility exists that the current upswing in India might even be driven by a (or a few) new variants.
What we saw in April 2020 was that the original Wuhan variant was completely overrun across the globe in a matter of weeks. The reason being that the original variant had an R0 somewhere around 1.3 and the April 2020 variant had an R0 somewhere around 2.5. Any time you see that big of an advantage, you’ll see rapid dominance develop in whatever area it’s present. And in a world where global travel is trivial (i.e. accessible to the masses) and frequent, you can expect that dominance to rapidly establish itself everywhere.
With India’s population density and widespread poverty, I expect we’ll see a really ugly situation unfold there with some mix of the UK, South Africa, and Brazil variants initially followed by some homegrown ones. Hopefully nothing emerges with significant changes to the S protein.
why aren’t the cdc and fauxi concerned about an uptick in cases while our feral government opens the border and distributes thousands of disease carrying invaders across our country during a “global pandemic”???...