Newsweek: The Doomsday Variant

COVER STORY: A doomsday COVID variant worse than Delta and Lambda may be coming, scientists sayhttps://t.co/PUhsfcIrMh pic.twitter.com/pGwojRNJin

— Newsweek (@Newsweek) August 4, 2021

COVID-19 could increase dementia, other brain disorders for decades to comehttps://t.co/lLdoXkRoil

— Newsweek (@Newsweek) August 4, 2021

It is a reasonable question.

What if most people get vaccinated and that only encourages the rise of variants which can evade vaccines and which are deadlier and more transmissible than the original COVID virus?

Newsweek:

“Scientists keep underestimating the coronavirus. In the beginning of the pandemic, they said mutated versions of the virus wouldn’t be much of a problem—until the more-infectious Alpha caused a spike in cases last fall. Then Beta made young people sicker and Gamma reinfected those who’d already recovered from COVID-19. Still, by March, as the winter surge in the U.S. receded, some epidemiologists were cautiously optimistic that the rapid vaccine rollout would soon tame the variants and cause the pandemic to wind down.

Delta has now shattered that optimism. This variant, first identified in India in December, spreads faster than any previous strain of SARS-CoV-2, as the COVID-19 virus is officially named. It is driving up infection rates in every state of the U.S., prompting the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to once again recommend universal mask-wearing. …

The variant is so contagious that it’s set to smash through every previous prediction of how soon the U.S. might reach herd immunity.  …

It’s too soon to say whether Lambda will turn out to be the next big, bad thing that COVID-19 unleashes on us. But it’s a good time to wonder: Just how destructive can these variants get? …

Is there a Doomsday variant out there that shrugs off vaccines, spreads like wildfire and leaves more of its victims much sicker than anything we’ve yet seen? …”

Wouldn’t that just be f***ing wonderful?