MOSCOW, June 21. /TASS/. The latest variety of the novel coronavirus "Delta", also referred to as the Indian strain, is 70% more contagious than the British one, which may considerably contribute to an upsurge in the number of infected patients and fatalities, cardiologist Simon Matskeplilshvili, of the Medical and Research Center at the Moscow State University, said on Monday.
Matskeplishvili, an associate member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, is a co-author of a dramatically new approach to the treatment of serious COVID-19 cases.
"Everybody must have now heard about the virus strain called 'Delta,' or the Indian strain. This strain is 70% more contagious than the British variety (strain 'Alpha'), which is 50% more contagious than the original one. It has turned out that even if the virus's lethality remains the same, while its contagiousness is far higher, the number of people that get infected from each sick person is far greater. This brings about a catastrophic increase in the number of new cases, and, regrettably, lethal outcomes," Matskeplishvili said in an online discussion Vaccination against COVID-19: Myths and the Reality on the Moscow State University's discussion platform A Dialogue on the Present and the Future.
He stressed that only vaccination and restrictive measures were capable of stopping the coronavirus from spreading.
"Apart from providing protection from serious forms of the disease, from hospital treatment, and from lethal outcomes vaccination considerably reduces the risk of asymptomatic transmission of the virus, which reduces the rate of its proliferation within the population in general," he explained.
Since the novel coronavirus pandemic began about 178.5 million people around the world have contracted the virus, and more than 3.8 million of them died. In Russia, according to the federal task force, a total of 5,334,204 cases of the disease have been identified, with 4,878,333 recoveries and 129,801 fatalities.