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New coronavirus variant: What do we know?

bbc.com

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Re: New coronavirus variant: What do we know?

#31

Post by Bombthecat »

maxerickson wrote: post #9
Tycho wrote: post #2

Wouldn't there be an element of cherry picking to this whole variant story? Like, don't viruses mutate constantly, we just don't analyze them in a disciplined manner most of the time, so if you start doing that you're bound to find something like this, but so would anyone else conducting a similar analysis anywhere else and at any other point in the pandemic?

Not really. Thousands of variations have ben sequenced, the notable thing here is the (potentially) faster spread.

Yeah, i read somewhere 70%.

Re: New coronavirus variant: What do we know?

#34

Post by robbiep »

hordeallergy wrote: post #19
zpeti wrote: post #3

There's so many questions that this raises. - Is it more infectious or just bypasses current immunities? - Will the vaccines basically be voided by this? - Is it less lethal? Could it create more general immunity in communities without killing? - Has is spread yet? I've read the UK gov knew about this in october... seems like it's probably everywhere by now

Yes, it's in other countries too eg Australia and Netherlands.

If may have been detected in Australia in returned travellers but it is not in Australia in the community.

Yesterday Australia had 15 community acquired cases (yes, 15 in total, with a further 11 from international travel in hotel quarantine) in the country and a quarter of sydney is in lockdown due to it, the virus variant is an American strain.

Re: New coronavirus variant: What do we know?

#35

Post by xiphias2 »

lucideer wrote: post #4
zpeti wrote: post #3

There's so many questions that this raises. - Is it more infectious or just bypasses current immunities? - Will the vaccines basically be voided by this? - Is it less lethal? Could it create more general immunity in communities without killing? - Has is spread yet? I've read the UK gov knew about this in october... seems like it's probably everywhere by now

No answers on most of those Qs, but the messaging on (2) "Will the vaccines basically be voided by this?" is that no, vaccines should still be effective. I'm not sure how they can no that without restarting extensive trials, but as a sibling commenter points out, viruses mutate constantly so I guess dealing with variants is pretty common when it comes to vaccination.

Safety is the hardest part of trials, and also the vaccines that were approved are in Phase 4 (post market surveillence).

Re: New coronavirus variant: What do we know?

#37

Post by mjul »

raphaelj wrote: post #7
Tycho wrote: post #2

Wouldn't there be an element of cherry picking to this whole variant story? Like, don't viruses mutate constantly, we just don't analyze them in a disciplined manner most of the time, so if you start doing that you're bound to find something like this, but so would anyone else conducting a similar analysis anywhere else and at any other point in the pandemic?

Also, the UK seems to do way more sequencing of the virus than any other country, so one would expect such cherry picking to actually happen in the UK.

According to the Danish Serum Institute, the UK is sequencing about 10% of the positive test results. The UK is considered a leader in this field in Europe including the British Isles.

For comparison, the Danish Serum Institute has a sequencing capacity about 5000 positive tests a week, a rate of around 25% of the positives at the current level.

Source, in Danish, from the Serum Institute:

https://www.ssi.dk/aktuelt/nyheder/2020/ny-covid-virusstamme...

Re: New coronavirus variant: What do we know?

#38

Post by maxerickson »

glitchc wrote: post #26
JetSetWilly wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Will the vaccines basically be voided by this? It has been around since September - if vaccines were voided it would have shown up in trials. It seems the human immune system is pretty smart and manufactures many different antibodies against many different sites on the spike protein. So even if some parts of the spike protein mutate, you still have antibodies that will do the job. - Is it less lethal? Could it crea…

Voided as a term doesn’t make sense. The vaccine will be less effective for sure, correlated to the distribution of the variant vs. the original strain in the population.

It's not really clear how the vaccine and variant will interact. It can be the case that the vaccine confers strong immunity against the variant or that it doesn't confer any immunity at all, it's not necessarily predictable or linear.

That said, what I've seen immunologists saying is that they expect the vaccine to still work well, because they wouldn't expect months of mutations to add up to the variant escaping the vaccine.

Re: New coronavirus variant: What do we know?

#40

Post by maest »

occamrazor wrote: post #21
robhu wrote: post #16

Ewan Birney (deputy directory of EMBL European Molecular Biology Laboratory)'s Twitter is a really good source of first class scientific information on this. You need to scroll back about 2 days to get the latest info (and he refers to the Twitter accounts of others in the field who can give more information). His Twitter profile is @ https://twitter.com/ewanbirney/ (Ewan is awesome - he is also (co)director of EMBL-…

Direct link to the thread where he explains why the evidence, although not conclusive, strongly supports a higher infectivity of the new variant: https://mobile.twitter.com/jcbarret/status/13407169016101724...

Are there any non-twitter sources available? I can't access that website.

Also, I doubt twitter is the place where that information should live long-term anyway.

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