How did India end up this way with the high death/hospilization? They seem to be doing well. I remember even talking to a friendly Indian person in the park a few months back and he even joked that maybe Indians immune system is used to all the germs. Is there a new mutant arising?
I would bet money that the Indian variant is more deadly than the ‘vanilla’ variant that the world has been dealing with previously. That was always the gamble and danger with perusing a herd immunity strategy based on uncontrolled wild spread of the live virus - that it will mutate into more infectious and/or deadly forms.
The timing of its emergence is also massively worrisome because it comes just as many countries are starting to roll back and relax Covid restrictions due to increasing vaccine numbers.
So really we could be looking at a perfect storm of the world being lured into a false sense of security from vaccinations based on vaccines that may no longer be effective against the new Indian variant; combined with the fake news and false information pandemic; that will hit health services already massively strained and operating at peak capacity for prolonged periods; together with a population completely fed up with lock downs and desperate for a return to normality and maybe you can see why I am massively worried that this will mirror past pandemics and deliver the much feared second wave peak of massively increased deaths worldwide compared to the first wave.
And I don’t think I am alone. I have heard from relatives that China is ramping up its own domestic vaccination efforts, so it may not surprise me if even Chinese vaccine supplies start to disappear off the world market as China start to prepare its own population for this new Indian variant.
