Following summary courtesy of Dr. JP Santiago:
1/ We have given up as a nation and as a world in this pandemic. Human behavior remains his biggest concern in this pandemic. We are now at one out of every 512 Americans has died of COVID. Exponential spread of the Delta variant is continuing unabated due to behavioral factors. Our behavior is costing us the battle in this pandemic. It will get worse.
2/ "WE WILL NOT GET TO HERD IMMUNITY."
3/ "WE WILL NOT PREVENT EMERGENCE OF FURTHER VARIANTS."
4/ No previous vaccine has been studied to the same degree and scrutinized to the same degree prior to release as the COVID vaccines. The risks and benefits of vaccination are clear and they heavily favor the benefits based on millions and millions of doses administered worldwide.
5/ Overall, if you are unvaccinated, you have a 3X greater chance of getting infected than someone who is vaccinated. If you are unvaccinated, you have an 8X greater chance of having symptoms than someone who is vaccinated. If you are unvaccinated, you hae a 25X greater chance of being hospitalized for COVID than someone who is vaccinated.
6/ With the Delta variant, if you had COVID before and are unvaccinated, you have a 2.34X greater chance of getting reinfected and the symptoms may be worse.
7/ Kids infected with the Delta variant get sick quickly. Data from Canada shows kids infected with Delta have a 2.75X risk of hospitalization compared to if they had been infected with the virus from last year.
8/ At the time of diagnosis, those vaccinated and those unvaccinated HAVE THE SAME VIRAL LOADS. This why we must mask up even if vaccinated. But in those vaccinated, the viral loads drop faster as the immune system kicks in. The Delta variant causes viral loads 1000 to 1200X higher than last year's virus.
9/ “We are doing a huge experiment with our youth. We are taking the most contagious viral variant, not letting them use masks and crowding them together to see what happens.”
“Not one single expert thinks this is a good idea.”
While there are benefits to in-person learning, it can ONLY take place with two simple measures- vaccinate all the teachers and staff and mandate masks.
10/ Very good data from the UK shows a 9X increase in infection and transmission in school age children with the Delta variant compared to last year's virus.
11/ Most medications in widespread use today have had far fewer study participants as part of their approval process than the COVID vaccines. Full approval is coming soon, but it will not change vaccine-hesitant behaviors.
12/ The mutation rate of the virus is inversely proportional to the vaccination rate. The more we vaccinate, the less likely we will have new variants. But because people will not vaccinate, we get variants and the variants are why we need vaccination mandates.
13/ The pandemic will not end given the way the American public is behaving. We are on the verge of the emergence of a variant that will set us back at square one all over again.
14/ We do not yet know what level of antibodies are protective. We call this "correlates of protection". We were starting to get early data on this, but then the emergence of the variants set us back in determining correlates of protection.
15/ The incubation period of most infectious diseases is long enough to spool up and activate our long term immunity. The original SARS-CoV-2 virus and to an extent the Alpha variant had a long enough incubation period (7-10 days from exposure to development of symptoms) to allow for long term immunity to be activated. The Delta variant has a much shorter incubation period (only 3 days, 4 days max from exposure to development of symptoms) with very high viral loads that may be overwhelming the activation of long term immunity.
16/ We have had prior warnings of coronaviruses with SARS in 2003 and MERS in 2012. There will be future coronaviruses that will constitute a threat to all of us.
but let's hear it
