The CDC says vaccine protection is tumbling for older Americans, though they still work very well for younger people

It is extremely similar to several other coronaviruses, SARS, MERS and historically the coronavirus we now call OC43 from the 1899 pandemic. Compared to the Black death or Ebola it isn't so bad at 1% fatality rate. Things get really serious when the disease causes >30% fatalities.

You can never say never unless someone was careless and left a GM marker gene in the final construct but it looks far more like a natural virus that has jumped species naturally to all but the most paranoid.

Delta is about where a designer virus might have *aimed* to start out. The original Covid-19 looks much more like something that has changed hosts and then adjusted to maximise its infectivity in that new host.

Bats have a very funny immune system that allows them to coexist with a lot of viruses in their system without getting sick. They are a perfect reservoir for this sort of potential crossover infection.

There is an advantage to society if everyone behaves sensibly but in the US the right to do really stupid things is absolute.

Yes. At least in the UK with about 80% of people now vaccinated the infection is still pretty equally split between the small unvaccinated

It is still infecting a hell of a lot of people daily in the UK where Delta is the dominant strain. Being vaccinated gives you a slight edge of about 3x more exposure before being infected but the most important thing it does is a 20x decrease in the risk of hospitalisation or death.

NB a single dose of a two dose vaccine schema gives almost no useful protection against Delta according to the BMA. It worked pretty well against all the earlier strains from 10 days after the first jab.

Yes. It would work if we had a proper truly sterilising vaccine but the real world data from Israel and UK shows clearly that without other additional measures the vaccine on its own cannot bring the infection levels down. It merely limits the harm that Covid can inflict on us.

Scotland is ahead of the rest of England (their schools have been back for 3 weeks now and 1 in 45 Scots had active Covid infections last week.

They have similar vaccination levels to the rest of the UK. What has changed is that their schools and shortly universities are back on campus. I fully expect the UK Covid rate curve to track last years shape but starting from a baseline 30x higher (so eroding the roughly 30-60x protective factor against serious illness that the vaccine provides).

England is at about 1 in 75 at present. These are high numbers! It will really take off again in October just like last year. Freshers week parties will drive infections in the young and then spill out into cities.

Professional opinions vary on that.

It would be interesting to locate the natural precursor.

And the Wuhan institute had people crawling through caves all over Asia and sending virus samples (including the ones in themselves) back to home base for experimenting. That was known to be hazardous.

Hey SL0WMAN, that decision took us down a rabbit hole that shows how dangerous such mandates can be, even to a brain-dead libtard such as yourself

In the infamous 1927 case Buck v. Bell, the Supreme Court accepted the questionable “facts” presented in the lower court cases that a young Virginia woman named Carrie Bell hailed from a long line of “mental defectives” whose offspring were a burden on public welfare.

The Buck decision opened the floodgates and by 1930, a total of 24 states had passed involuntary sterilization laws and around 60,000 women were ultimately sterilized under these statutes.

Don't be silly; that 'if they had...' question is unanswerable, so is a perfect example of a lame excuse. And, incarceration (forced habitation within a crowded building) is at least as stupid as most cases of vaccine aversion.

There IS NO TEST for degree-of-immunity. There IS NO TEST for 'prior covid infection' that has much significance; immune response can result from virus fragments that aren't infective. So, it makes no sense to hang any important decisions on those factors; it's like assuming luck, or karma, will protect against a plague. You can't test for tomorrow's luck, nor for karmic status, either.