General Comments / Chat, page-3288

This is not quite true as the current vaccines do have some limited protection against infection with the new variants (~60% in the real world), but this is not really high enough to control the spread virus in the population. The unconstrained R0 of Delta is so high (8-10) that it is impossible to achieve herd immunity even if we were to immunise everyone (including kids). The best we can aim for here in Australia is to vaccinate everyone who wants to be vaccinated and save about 90% of these people from dying while we wait for nearly everyone be infected. The positive is this infection will act as a strong booster for the variant, the negative is we may see annual sweeps of new variants every year like we do with the flu.

Of course if we had better vaccines then this gloomy outlook could change, but we don’t seem to be moving as fast on this as we need to keep ahead of the virus.