Delta mutation is no reason to panic — but Covid vaccination remains crucial, scientists say

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Delta mutation is no reason to panic — but Covid vaccination remains crucial, scientists say
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Known as AY.4.2, there are some concerns the newly discovered subvariant could be more transmissible than the original delta strain.

"It looks like it has somewhere between a 12% and 18% transmission advantage over delta, so it's not good news in that sense. It's going to make things a bit more difficult, but it's not a massive jump," Pagel said.

"Delta compared to alpha was around 60% more transmissible, it was doubling every week. This is going up by a percent or two a week — it's much, much slower. So in that sense, it's not a big disaster like delta was. It will probably gradually replace delta over the next few months. But there's no sign it's more vaccine resistant, [so] at the moment I wouldn't be panicking about it.

However, the emergence of the new mutation did raise some concerns, Pagel said. If the new mutation arrived in countries that were further behind the U.K. in their vaccination programs, it would create additional problems, she added. It also proved the coronavirus is still mutating. "There are lots of different subtypes of delta, [but] this is the first subtype that seems to actually have an advantage over the other deltas," Pagel said. "And it just shows that there's more places for it to go and evolve to. Some people have been saying delta's hit the sweet spot – well look, it's found another sweet spot.

"Everybody, vaccinated or otherwise, will be catching this virus one day," Matthews warned. "So there's only one question to ask yourself: do you want to meet this vaccine with your immune system trained or untrained for the fight?"

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