During today's CNCAV meeting, Romanian Government officials reconfirmed that the Delta strain of Coronavirus is a major threat to Romanians who are not currently immunized with the vaccines available worldwide.
Below are explanations of how the antibodies generated by healing after infection with infection with an initial variant of Coronavirus offer protection, as well as what kind of protection is offered by vaccine-generated antibodies.
"Currently, the main concern, globally, is related to the possibility and very high probability of spreading the infection with the Delta viral variant. What makes this strain so disturbing? There are some elements that are related, on the one hand, to contagiousness and infectivity, the data are very clear, which show us an increased capacity to transmit the infection with the Delta variant, due to the fact that it binds very easily to the receptors, it multiplies in a much larger amount and, as such, the amount of virus in the respiratory secretions is higher.
Basically, that baseline factor for case reproduction, in the case of the Delta variant compared to the Alpha variant and the original Wuhan variant, is much higher. A positive case of Delta infection can lead to up to 6-7 secondary cases of the disease, just as a case of infection with the Alpha variant, with the variant, with the British strain, which is currently dominant, can generate about 3 -4 secondary cases, and the infection with the original strain in Wuhan generated about two secondary cases of the disease.
Also, another feature of the Delta viral variant is related to the ability to escape the protection of the immune response, especially in people who have the disease, with various other viral variants, in about 20-50% of cases people who have been infected with SARS-CoV-2 with other viral variants, especially with the original Wuhan variant, are not sufficiently well protected from the risk of reinfection.
As such, everything we see at the moment in South Africa, but also in other countries, such as India, we see that in South Africa, for example, a country with a vaccination coverage rate below 5%, we have in At the moment there is a significant evolution of the number of cases, there is practically a third major wave of diseases, this being caused by the infection with the Delta strain, given that the first wave of diseases was caused by the Wuhan strain, the second the South African strain and the third of the Delta strain, which means that a large part of those people are people who get reinfections.
That is why, looking at the recently published scientific data, just last week, this shows us the neutralizing activity of antibodies from people who have gone through the natural disease on this strain. What we do know at the moment is that the activity of antibodies, the activity of neutralizing deconvalescent serum, that is, people who have gone through the disease, is about twice as low as the Alpha strain, about 5.5 times lower than Delta strain and about 8 times lower than Beta strain, South African strain. Basically, going through the disease does not protect us well enough from the risk of getting sick with this Delta strain. ”