Almost 2 years have passed since the start of the pandemic, and we still know too little about COVID-19. The only thing that has become clearer is that vaccination and quarantine measures are working. However, the virus mutates, and it is important for us to know what it is capable of.
Scientists from the Austrian Institute of Science and Technology have published a new study on the spread of coronavirus in the journal Scientific Reports. They modeled the likelihood of a strain that would be resistant to vaccines, assuming a hypothetical group of 10 million people, all of whom would be vaccinated within a few years.
Among other things, scientists took into account real mortality, the rate of decline in immunity, different rates of vaccination, the contagiousness of the virus and the impact of quarantine measures on its spread. And the results of the study turned out to be … not particularly comforting for those who, under the pretext of vaccination, would like to abandon quarantine restrictions.
As Fedor Kondrashov, a geneticist and one of the authors of the study, noted in an interview with Meduza (the publication has the status of a foreign agent), under the conditions of quarantine restrictions and social distancing, we achieve two goals at once:
- people are less likely to get sick and die;
- the likelihood of a strain that will be resistant to vaccines is reduced – there will be fewer infected, in whose organisms mutations can occur.
It turns out that by reducing the incidence, we not only save ourselves and unload hospitals, but also do not allow dangerous types of the virus to develop.
But what about vaccination? They said that if the majority get vaccinated, then herd immunity will save us. Why are restrictions needed then?
It turned out that it was during the vaccination period that quarantine measures were more important than ever. The fact is that a resistant (vaccine resistant) strain will most likely appear when we reach the threshold of herd immunity and relax restrictions.
“When most people are vaccinated, the vaccine-resistant strain spreads through the population faster than the parent strain,” said Simon Rella, a PhD student at the Austrian Institute of Science and Technology.
60% – this is the level of the vaccinated population that is considered a critical threshold. And if at the moment when the percentage of vaccinated people becomes just that, quarantine measures are weakened, removed or simply ignored, then we may be faced with a strain that no vaccine will “take”.
Is there a way out? Yes. The secret of success lies in the strict observance of 2 conditions: control of the rate of vaccination, which should not decrease, and compliance with the restrictions. By refusing to fulfill one of them, we provoke either an increase in the incidence, or the emergence of a dangerous strain.
And on this issue, we, all countries, need to unite. According to Fedor Kondrashov, even if one country fulfills all the conditions, and the other does not, then in the end the dangerous strain will be both there and there. Therefore, compliance with these conditions should be mandatory for all.
Interview with Fyodor Kondrashov: https://meduza.io/feature/2021/08/09/mozhet-li-poyavitsya-shtamm-kovida-ot-kotorogo-ne-zaschityat-vaktsiny-kogda-eto-sluchitsya-i-kak- etomu-protivostoyat