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POSTED BY: YEN NEE LEE VIA CNBC<\/p>\n
The pandemic is not coming to an end soon \u2014 given that only a small proportion of the world population has been vaccinated against Covid-19, a well-known epidemiologist told CNBC.<\/p>\n
Dr. Larry Brilliant, an epidemiologist who was part of the World Health Organization\u2019s team that helped eradicate smallpox, said the delta variant is \u201cmaybe the most contagious virus\u201d ever.<\/p>\n
In recent months, the U.S., India and China, as well as other countries in Europe, Africa and Asia have been grappling with a\u00a0highly transmissible delta variant<\/a>\u00a0of the virus.<\/p>\n WHO declared Covid-19\u00a0a global pandemic<\/a>\u00a0last March \u2014 after the disease, which first emerged in China in late 2019, spread throughout the world.<\/p>\n The good news is that vaccines \u2014 particularly those using messenger RNA technology and the one by\u00a0Johnson & Johnson<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 are holding up against the delta variant, Brilliant told CNBC\u2019s \u201cStreet Signs\u201d on Friday.<\/p>\n Still, only 15% of the world population has been vaccinated and more than 100 countries have inoculated less than 5% of their people, noted Brilliant.<\/p>\n \u201cI think we\u2019re closer to the beginning than we are to the end [of the pandemic], and that\u2019s not because the variant that we\u2019re looking at right now is going to last that long,\u201d said Brilliant, who is now the founder and CEO of a pandemic response consultancy, Pandefense Advisory.<\/p>\n \u201cUnless we vaccinate everyone in 200 plus countries, there will still be new variants,\u201d he said, predicting that the coronavirus will eventually become a \u201cforever virus\u201d like influenza.<\/p>\n Brilliant said his models on the Covid outbreak in San Francisco and New York predict an \u201cinverted V-shape epidemic curve.\u201d That implies that infections increase very quickly, but would also decline rapidly, he explained.<\/p>\n If the prediction turns out be true, it means that the delta variant spreads so quickly that \u201cit basically runs out of candidates\u201d to infect, explained Brilliant.<\/p>\n There appears to be a similar pattern in the U.K. and India, where the spread of the delta variant has receded from recent highs.<\/p>\n<\/div>\nProbability of \u2018super variant\u2019<\/h3>\n
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