Deadly Delta in T&T
The deadly Delta is in T&T. No surprise.
Identified in India in December 2020, it has spread to more than 130 countries globally, and by August 2021 responsible for 100 percent of new cases in the UK and US. It’s not just faster but far deadlier.
If some 1,173 people in T&T have died from COVID-19, the numbers we could face if we don’t vaccinate up to 90 per cent of our population could easily be almost ten times that amount.
Despite the fact 61 per cent of the adult population is currently vaccinated in the US, the New York Times reports that infections and hospitalisations are increasing rapidly as the Delta variant spreads, with the US averaging over 100,000 new cases each day with more employers requiring all their employees be vaccinated and many colleges mandating shots for students.
Dr. Tara Smith, an American epidemiologist, writes that Intensive Care Units in Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana are “stretched”, health care workers are “exhausted”, out-of-state nurses are being called in. Mississippi is “setting up a field hospital to handle excess patients.” Those infected with Delta pass the virus to 5–9.5 people, making it as “infectious as chickenpox” and higher than the original virus identified in Wuhan, China, when each person infected up to four people The National Geographic reports the Delta is not only “more transmissible than the previous SARS-CoV-2 variant,” but also more severe with “1,000 times the number of viral particles or viral load compared to the original strain” and “ten-fold higher viral load than non-Delta infections” replicating “faster in the nose.”
The American Society for Microbiology says symptoms include “fever, headache, sore throat and runny nose are common, while cough and loss of smell are not.” Serious symptoms include “hearing impairment, severe gastrointestinal issues and blood clots leading to tissue death and gangrene.”
In science-speak, this “P68IR mutation” can invade host cells (that’s you and me, potential hosts to this killer virus) to accelerate infection and breakthrough our immune response.
The National Geographic quoting Scripps Research Translational Institute says the Delta “as transmissible in the vaccinated as it is in the unvaccinated,” leading to the commonly asked question among the vaccine-hesitant. If vaccines don’t prevent spread, why should I get vaccinated? The chance of being hospitalised or dying from Delta drops to one per cent in the fully vaccinated.
A vaccinated person with mild symptoms can pass on the Delta to an unvaccinated person who could get very sick and die.
If you want the pandemic to end, those numbers must drop to each person infecting less than one. (With Delta you can infect up to ten, and with Alpha up to four people) And for that to happen, the CDC warns some 80-90 per cent of us need to be vaccinated and need to continue to wear masks.
Given that T&T has the vaccines from the US, Canada and China (908,000 Pfizer, 82,030 AstraZeneca and 800,000 Sinopharm), our citizens have a choice, literally to vaccinate or face severe disease or death. If it sounds grim, it is.
Manoj Murhekar, director of the National Institute of Epidemiology in Chennai, quoted by a peer-reviewed science and technology journal–Nature, calculated that “up to 4.9 million people could have died in India since the pandemic began–much higher than 425,000, the official number of recorded deaths due to COVID- 19. Half these deaths probably occurred in just three months over the second wave.”
This gross undercounting of Delta deaths in India was echoed by Arvind Subramanian (of Brown University’s Watson Center and former chief economic adviser to the government of India). Speaking on the National Public Radio ( July 21, 2021), Subramanian estimated that according to research led by him, up to five million Indians could have died from the Delta since December 2020.
It comes down to vaccinations. Even now, only up to eight per cent of India is fully vaccinated.
US President Jo Biden has called this an epidemic of the unvaccinated. The Commonwealth Fund claims vaccines have prevented some 279,000 deaths in the US (61 per cent of the US is vaxxed), 30,300 deaths in the UK, and 46,300 hospitalisations. (up to 90 per cent of the UK is vaxxed) We know God is a Trini, and that’s why he’s provided three brands of WHO-approved vaccines to protect ourselves from the carnage. For those who call it an emergency vaccine, I have news for you. This is an emergency.
People are dying. COVID vaccines have saved lives. Scientists have thrown everything at this, including the entire body of research on all vaccines. T&T needs to decide whether we believe “God helps those who help themselves” or whether we have decided to do our will and roll over and die.