MIT Tech19 Jul 2021 16:27
Good article - selected paragraphs from the link below
https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/07/18/1029638/why-englands-sudden-lifting-of-covid-restrictions-is-a-massive-gamble/
“That’s dangerous,” says evolutionary virologist Emilia Skirmuntt. “We need to vaccinate teenagers urgently, especially before they return to school in September.”
“This reopening is going to lead to a lot of avoidable damage,” says Deepti Gurdasani, a clinical epidemiologist at Queen Mary University of London. “We should be halting easing up until all adults and adolescents have been offered both doses of the vaccine.”
In a webinar on Thursday, Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer for England, said the country could see “quite scary numbers again” and “get into trouble again surprisingly fast.”
About one in 10 of those who catch covid-19 go on to develop long covid, according to the WHO. That means if another million people in the UK get sick during this wave—a plausible scenario by most estimates—there could be another 100,000 people with long-term issues.
On July 5, Steve Paterson, co-director of the Centre for Genomic Research at the University of Liverpool, summed up the concerns in a tweet: “Letting a virus rip through a partially vaccinated population is exactly the experiment I’d do to evolve a virus able to evade immunity.”
Some evolutionary biologists say we should take some comfort from the fact we are starting to see the same mutations pop up repeatedly, a phenomenon called convergent evolution. That may suggest that the virus is running out of ways to adapt.
But Skirmuntt, who studies how viruses evolve, says vaccine escape is a scenario we should fear, whatever the chances. She likens it to running around in a field of land mines.
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