IN THE LAST months of 2020 researchers around the world began to see variants of SARS-CoV-2 with not just one or two mutations but ten or 20. Some of these new variants turned out to have new properties they could spread faster, shrug off antibodies, or both. First Alpha appeared in Britain in September 2020; then came Beta in South Africa and Gamma in Brazil. Each infection with the original virus, as sequenced in Wuhan in January 2020, had been estimated to lead to roughly 2.5 subsequent infections in the absence of countermeasures. Under the same conditions the “reproductive number” for Alpha was reckoned to be almost twice as large: four or five. British scientists estimate that in unvaccinated populations the reproductive number of the Delta variant, a key factor in the catastrophic Indian epidemic in recent months, may be as high as eight. It now threatens the world.
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