Then there’s this, from the same link:
– “A few cases have also been identified in US. There had been some in Denmark but new infections with AY.4.2 have since gone down.”
Even Prof. Balloux admits that this is bunk, but he seems to like speaking in code:
– “The situation in Denmark has to be interpreted carefully. The population size of SARS-CoV-2 is much smaller than in the UK. In small populations of constant size, a ~10% selective advantage is not necessarily sufficient to counteract demographic stochasticity.”
More simply put, we cannot draw conclusions from the Denmark data because very few cases have been found so far. That is unsurprising because, not only does Denmark have far fewer infections in total, they also do far less sequencing.
But worldwide, absolute numbers of AY.4.2 are more than tripling each month, which equates to about 25% transmission advantage. Why on Earth ignore the world data and instead draw attention to Denmark, unless you wanted to play it down?
Going on UK growth rates, AY-4-2 will amount to 50% of infections by around Christmas.