On May 25, when I wrote my first Vaxx Populi post on Delta (B.1.617.2), there was a lot about this new variant of concern that experts were unsure of, including how contagious it was and, perhaps most importantly, how the current roster of COVID-19 vaccines held up against it.
Delta is now everywhere. In early May, there was a COVID-19 outbreak at the Baffinland mine in Nunavut. Only after the firm stopped production and sent ?low risk? workers back to their homes, did they realize that at least one had the Delta variant. Those workers, who returned to every province, helped seed Delta across the country, according to a Toronto Star investigation.
More recently, there has been a Delta outbreak at the Foothills Medical Centre in Calgary, with 16 patients and six staff infected. The majority experienced mild symptoms, though one required treatment in the intensive care unit. Of the 22, 11 had been fully vaccinated, while seven had one dose; all were given an mRNA vaccine, communications director Kerry Williamson of Alberta Health Services told Maclean?s. (The province did not disclose whether the one admitted to ICU had been vaccinated.) That news from Alberta has sparked alarm regarding how much protection even fully vaccinated people had against Delta, and whether the contagious VOC will spark a fourth wave of the pandemic, just as provinces are reopening for the summer after their third waves.
Now, we know a lot more, thanks largely to Public Health England (PHE), a world ...