We should presume that if something takes over quickly, it has a very large advantage infecting people who are unvaccinated and lack natural immunity.
We should presume that if it also has an additional property of vaccine escape, that seems like quite a coincidence, so it seems unlikely.
We should consider this even more unlikely if the variant started out in places with low vaccination rates.
I’m suggesting that population inhomogeneity weakens this argument, and that immune escape + population inhomogeneity would seem to be a plausible explanation of how omicron appears so much more infectious than delta. I wasn’t assuming immune escape / erosion, I was arguing for it being more likely / less unlikely given what we know.
This seems correct to me, but I don’t immediately see the importance/relevancy of this? At any rate the escape is speculative at this point.
Oh, I was responding to this part:
I’m suggesting that population inhomogeneity weakens this argument, and that immune escape + population inhomogeneity would seem to be a plausible explanation of how omicron appears so much more infectious than delta. I wasn’t assuming immune escape / erosion, I was arguing for it being more likely / less unlikely given what we know.