Vaccine-resistant coronavirus ‘mutants’ are more likely when transmission is high, new model finds

Photo caption: Healthcare workers get the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccination […] Photo credit: Getty / Paula Bronstein / Contributor. Article by Nicoletta Lanese. Live Science – August 6, 2021.

Vaccine-resistant coronavirus mutants are more likely to emerge when a large fraction of the population is vaccinated and viral transmission is high, and no steps are taken to stop the spread […]

Since we don’t live in a model, the authors instead recommend that people maintain measures like masking and distancing “for a reasonable period of time,” even once the proportion of people vaccinated nears the herd immunity threshold, they wrote in their report. This would help drive resistant strains to extinction before they spread too far.

That aligns with the new guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which state that fully vaccinated people should wear masks in public indoor spaces if there is “substantial” coronavirus transmission in their area. (You can track your county transmission rate on the CDC website.) That’s because vaccinated people who catch delta may sometimes be able to spread the virus as easily as those who are unvaccinated.

Click here to view original web page at www.livescience.com