Hospital admissions are also skewing a lot younger. Fortunately even if they do get hospitalised younger people are still less likely to die.
Still, deaths are happening. My wife is in health care and she hears stories of people swearing blind Coronavirus doesn't exist and that vaccines are a conspiracy, while dying of it.
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/07/13/world/covid-variant-...
Besides the headline, here are some other phrases in it pointing out the difference in impact on the vaccinated and unvaccinated.
> the recommendations of health experts, even as the virus’s Delta variant and other mutations fuel outbreaks in areas where vaccination rates are below the national average.
> Public health experts have said that a strong vaccination effort is critical for the United States to outrun the virus
The (apparent) reality that Delta appears to have a lower IFR and that hospitalization rate for vaccinated people for Alpha or Delta is extremely low do not seem to get the same level of coverage as context for the click/view-generating reporting.
Let's be clear: the good data so far is coming from a country with a high vaccination rate. I'm not willing to extrapolate from the UK data to countries who haven't vaccinated their vulnerable populations.
> By far, the most widely studied trade-off involves transmission and virulence (Anderson and May, 1982; Frank, 1996; Alizon et al. 2009). Transmission and virulence are linked by within-host replication: increasing parasite abundance increases the likelihood of transmission, but also increases the likelihood of host death; mathematically, this assumption can be formalized by making transmission rate β an increasing function of parasite-induced mortality rate ν. Nearly all of the literature we summarize below assumes this trade-off.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/parasitology/article...
And also all of:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1420-9101....
The trade-off hypothesis should apply in this case specifically because the proposed mechanism is via improved spike binding to ACE2 and that it has been claimed that increased viral loads have been observed.
This wouldn't be a worry for anyone vaccinated, of course, but for still immunologically naive people (antivaxxers in the first world, and those without access to vaccination elsewhere) then Delta should be of greater concern.
Maybe they do this five paragraphs down. I almost never see this mentioned within the same paragraph as the "highly infectious" claim, which is always at the very top of the story.
> It’s not clear to me what point you’re trying to make by insisting that it is significantly less dangerous to the vaccinated that isn’t being made by every news outlet and government agency that I have been following.
Two things:
1) I am not "insisting"...I'm providing data. Nobody should believe me blindly. I am nobody.
2) If you already know these facts, great! Most people don't.
ok, three things:
3) I'm not sure why you're so prickly about the fact that I'm sharing factual information.
What you say you’ve never seen is literally what they’ve done.
I haven't found that latter part to be true in general. We can disagree on that.
So they are all clearly reporting this. And the reality is that there are tens of millions of people who are not vaccinated who are extremely susceptible to the Delta variant.
It’s not clear to me what point you’re trying to make by insisting that it is significantly less dangerous to the vaccinated that isn’t being made by every news outlet and government agency that I have been following.