“The latest narrative...which is claimed to be much more contagious — a claimed 70%(!) increase in transmissibility — than the original dominant variant.”
I’m as anti-FluBro as they come, but this is getting silly. So this ‘new strain’ shows up just as the PR Machines are in full-force to get people to vaccinate.
So I did a bit of looking into just how ‘bad’ this UK outbreak is, and compared it to the rise in cases in early November, in the rest of Europe (which lasted 3 weeks and then subsided). Guess what, no worse. Difference being when that outbreak started there was no vaccine (we hadn’t voted yet), there was no talk about a ‘Frankenstein Strain’, and the reaction in Europe was NOT panic. Click on the individual countries to see...and keep in mind that the UK, Italy, and France have almost the same populations, so direct number comparisons are fine.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
If you go to the US site above and click on Florida, California, and Texas, you’ll see how great the California lock-down is working against the Florida and Texas, two states without lockdowns (hint, California is far worse)...so, so much for that great ‘solution’.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/
As to debating the vaccine, it won’t matter, vaccination will not be by choice, it will be done by lawyers advising travel companies (and likely all other big companies) that the best way for companies to not get sued for outbreaks is to simply require proof of vaccination...at that point, we’ll all get to decide what rights/freedoms/careers we want to trade-off if we choose to not vaccinate. The only real hope for the anti-vaxxers who want to keep their full freedom would be laws to prohibit companies from imposing vaccination requirements - not going to happen, not under Biden, and not with this Congress in any case. So, feel free to keep arguing it, but the ‘fix’ is in, like it or not.
“New strain” is based entirely on modeling by the same guy who said US would have 2 million deaths.