Coronavirus’s delta variant isn’t going away and is so transmissible that the U.S. eventually will become a country where everyone is either infected with it or vaccinated, a Harvard epidemiologist said Tuesday.
“What we’re looking at now is really a pandemic which is substantially, although not entirely, driven by the delta variant,” William Hanage, associate professor of epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said during an online forum. “The most important thing from an epidemiologist’s perspective, and that’s where I’m coming from, is that it’s more transmissible, which means it can get into people before they can be vaccinated, and it can cause disease … Before terribly long, everybody in the country will have either been infected with delta or vaccinated.”
The delta variant is so transmissible, Hanage said, that it is increasing even in places like Israel that have relatively high vaccination rates.
“What does appear to be the case with delta is that it can replicate very, very quickly,” Hanage said, adding that “it looks as if the virus possibly does cause more severe disease.”
As a result, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently changed its guidance and now advises even people who are fully vaccinated to wear masks indoors in areas with substantial or high transmission, and that covers about 80 percent of U.S. counties as of yesterday, according to the CDC’s website.
“Because you are vaccinated, you might be feeling overly confident,” Hanage said, “and perhaps made contacts that you wouldn’t otherwise, which is one of the reasons why masks are sensible because masks are very good at preventing transmission from an infectious person.”
But the “single best thing” people can do to protect themselves and others is getting vaccinated, with a mask as a backup, he said.
“The risk to you personally is not very high,” Hanage said. “On the other hand, the risk of a large Delta surge to a community could be pretty high … I think that indoor mask use is something that will be extremely helpful to controlling delta surges.”
People who want to go eat or get something to drink with others, he said, should do so outdoors, six feet apart.
“The risks of outdoor transmission are … extremely low,” Hanage said, although, he added, “The delta variant probably does somewhat increase it.”
“There are all of these things that you can do that will reduce the likelihood of transmission occurring,” Hanage said, “but remember if you’re vaccinated, you have already done the most important thing that you can do to make yourself and your community safe.”
“We are in a worse situation than we would have been if Delta never happened,” he added, “but we are in a much better position than we might have been because we have vaccines.”
