Delta variant exploits low vaccine rates, easing of rules

The latest alarming coronavirus variant is exploiting low global vaccination rates and a rush to ease pandemic restrictions, adding new urgency to the drive to get more shots in arms and slow its supercharged spread.

The vaccines most used in Western countries still appear to offer strong protection against the highly contagious delta variant, first identified in India and now spreading in more than 90 other countries.

But the World Health Organization warned this week that the trifecta of easier-to-spread strains, insufficiently immunised populations and a drop in mask use and other public health measures before the virus is better contained will “delay the end of the pandemic.”

The delta variant is positioned to take full advantage of those chinks in any country's armour.

“Widespread vaccination remains even more critical because the virus that we have circulating is in fact more transmissible than the original wild type,” said Dr Rochelle Walensky, director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Amid concerns about the variant's spread, parts of Europe have reinstated travel quarantines, several Australian cities are in outbreak-sparked lockdown — and just as Japan readies for the Olympics, some visiting athletes are infected.

The mutation is causing worry even in countries with relatively successful immunisation campaigns that nonetheless haven't reached enough people to snuff out the virus.

For instance, the mutant has forced Britain, where nearly half the population is fully vaccinated, to postpone for a month its long-anticipated lifting of COVID-19 restrictions, as cases are doubling about every nine days.

In the US, “we're still vulnerable for these flare-ups and rebounds,” said Dr Hilary Babcock of Washington University at St. Louis.

The variants “are able to find any gaps in our protection,” she said, pointing to how hospital beds and intensive care units in Missouri's least-vaccinated southwestern counties suddenly are filling — mostly with adults under 40 who never got the shots. With nearly half the US population immunised, CDC tracking shows the variant spreading most quickly in swaths of the country with the lowest rates.

But the variant poses the most danger in countries where vaccinations are sparse.

Africa is seeing cases rise faster than ever before, partially driven by the mutation, the WHO said Thursday, while areas in Bangladesh that border India are also seeing a variant-fuelled surge.

Fiji, which got through the first year of the pandemic without just two virus deaths, is now experiencing a significant outbreak blamed on the strain, and Afghanistan is desperately seeking oxygen supplies because of it.

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