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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?

#271

Post by detritus »

motohagiography wrote: post #167
shalmanese wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I was bemused by the very chi-chi local middle class deli near my home insisting they'd be staying open when I enquired on Saturday evening. I mean, sure they sell food, but really - I'm unsure how vital to survival artisanal cheese and pasta is! Let's not repeat the mistakes of the first lockdown. If you close down too many places, all that causes is everyone cramming into the same few places still open, causing s…

In the march/april stage of the pandemic, I chose to shop at such "shi-shi" places exclusively because a) there were no lineups, b) their non-frozen supply chain meant they had to sell meat or it would rot, c) they were owned by people with families in the neighbourhood/city, and d) the higher prices kept out hoarders, panic buyers, and the mentally ill. On the last point, there was almost always some psycho causing…

I assume not, but if your final sentence was aimed at my tongue-in-cheek appraisal of the value of chi-chi delis (which, obviously, i was shopping in) during a pandemic, then please appreciate that I also today spent 35 minutes waiting in a queue for a local butcher and over the past months have been highly appreciative of my local Turkish-run mini-market.

I'm not sure I do think it's a British thing to hate on local shopowners, if anything - the opposite, what with us being a nation of them, and all.

Sure major Supermarkets have captured most of the spend, but that's just the way things are. Convenience comes in different forms.

Re: New coronavirus variant: What do we know?

#272

Post by cma »

hammock wrote: post #252
porknubbins wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of the finger pointing at China may be unfair but clearly they knew a lot about the virus while letting their citizens travel outside. Not that the West would’ve handled it any better necessarily but when you seed the world with virus there is going to be some blowback.

Not only this, they restricted travel from Wuhan region to other parts of China, while at the same time not restricting travel abroad.

They did restrict travel abroad. The US had to send a special plane to evacuate people because they had stopped international flights. And then the Us failed to strictly quarantine them and also the evacuating team according to a whistleblower didn't use proper PPE.

Re: New coronavirus variant: What do we know?

#273

Post by AndrewBissell »

addicted wrote: post #216
zaroth wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well we’re about 10 months into this and most news outlets won’t even admit that there’s natural immunity, even though with 10s of millions of cases we have maybe a dozen of cases worldwide of reinfection. I think the fundamental issue is that the public health measures break down once everyone doesn’t have to follow them. So either you refuse to admit that there’s no reason for a recovered COVID patient to wear a ma…

This does not appear to be true at all. Newspapers are very willing to admit natural immunity. But scientists point out they don't know how effective it is, and/or how long lasting it is. It's very clear newspapers have been way to casual with admitting natural immunity. If you want some fairly clear evidence of this, if you were gonna ask a 1000 people whether they were immune if they got the virus and recovered fro…

> If you want some fairly clear evidence of this, if you were gonna ask a 1000 people whether they were immune if they got the virus and recovered from it, I suspect 999 of them would say yes.

I don't think this is close to true. For example when Rand Paul claimed he had immunity after recovering from Covid, liberals I'm in casual contact with were jumping up and down screaming "he's not immune! he's not immune!" Of the maybe 10 people I know of who've had Covid and recovered, 2 are still actively worried and living in terror that they will get it again.

Re: New coronavirus variant: What do we know?

#274

Post by timr »

mrtnmcc wrote: post #211
timr wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a perfect example of mixing science and opinion, and we should be scolding "scientists" who do this without clarifying which is which, not lionizing them. The only definitively factual statement he makes is in the first tweet: "One of the key questions about the new variant (B.1.1.7) is whether there is conclusive evidence that it is more transmissible. I don't think we are absolutely certain yet" Everything…

You could spend ten minutes debating whether the growing bright light and rising Doppler sound exactly matches the expected profile of an oncoming train.. or you could just get off the tracks. Here absolute fact is only clear when the effect is so strong it's too late.

The problem is, there is always someone willing to make extreme arguments to convince people that this is the exceptional circumstance where evidence doesn't matter, and that we all need to do something urgent and panicky, now.

Usually, those people are wrong.

Re: New coronavirus variant: What do we know?

#275

Post by 9HZZRfNlpR »

rualca wrote: post #232
caeril wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Journalists not understanding Journalists don't understand anything about the topics on which they write, but they regard themselves as paragons of virtue and arbiters of Truth with a capital T. Trump is a garbage president but the one thing he got right was identifying the fourth estate as the enemy of the people. They were Enemies in March when they told everyone it was just the Flu, and NOT to wear masks, and th…

> Journalists don't understand anything about the topics on which they write, but they regard themselves as paragons of virtue and arbiters of Truth with a capital T. This assertion makes no sense at all. Journalists aren't expected to create their content from thin air. They are expected to talk with primary sources, ask them questions, gather the answers and information, and report on that to the public. > Trump is…

I swear to gid during the Bush era all the 'liberal' newspapers and people on reddit claimed the voting machines are rigged. Now it's the opposite. It's a never ending bullshit from you.

Re: New coronavirus variant: What do we know?

#276

Post by ithkuil »

addicted wrote: post #216
zaroth wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well we’re about 10 months into this and most news outlets won’t even admit that there’s natural immunity, even though with 10s of millions of cases we have maybe a dozen of cases worldwide of reinfection. I think the fundamental issue is that the public health measures break down once everyone doesn’t have to follow them. So either you refuse to admit that there’s no reason for a recovered COVID patient to wear a ma…

This does not appear to be true at all. Newspapers are very willing to admit natural immunity. But scientists point out they don't know how effective it is, and/or how long lasting it is. It's very clear newspapers have been way to casual with admitting natural immunity. If you want some fairly clear evidence of this, if you were gonna ask a 1000 people whether they were immune if they got the virus and recovered fro…

My anecdotal evidence is that most people I talk to believe that reinfection is possible or even likely, as "shown by the news"

Re: New coronavirus variant: What do we know?

#277

Post by rualca »

9HZZRfNlpR wrote: post #275
rualca wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Journalists don't understand anything about the topics on which they write, but they regard themselves as paragons of virtue and arbiters of Truth with a capital T. This assertion makes no sense at all. Journalists aren't expected to create their content from thin air. They are expected to talk with primary sources, ask them questions, gather the answers and information, and report on that to the public. > Trump is…

I swear to gid during the Bush era all the 'liberal' newspapers and people on reddit claimed the voting machines are rigged. Now it's the opposite. It's a never ending bullshit from you.

I'm sorry to burst your childish "but he started it" bubble, but I am not a US citizen nor have I ever set foot in the US. So please direct your childish ad hominem attacks and general finger wagging elsewhere, and meanwhile do some introspection.

Re: New coronavirus variant: What do we know?

#278

Post by curryst »

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?

My layman's interpretation is that variants are kind of a stepping stone to a strain. Viruses do mutate constantly, but I would guess that many (maybe most) of those mutations are effectively a no-op. It's a mutation in a dormant region, so it does nothing. Of the mutations that occur in an active region, some will be bad, and those mutations die out.

So I would think we're really only concerned with mutations in active regions that impact viability. We don't really care about mutations that decrease viability, since they'll generally be overcome by more viable versions of the virus naturally.

The question with this particular mutation is whether it's a variant or a strain. I.e. is this new variant more infectious? Which would make it a strain, not a variant.

Re: New coronavirus variant: What do we know?

#279

Post by mercer »

LatteLazy wrote: post #66
gns24 wrote: post #43

I think most people seem to be underestimating just how bad this is. During the recent 4-week lockdown it was already clear that something odd was going on in Kent; whilst case counts were dropping in the rest of the country, they continued to rise significantly there. Something was clearly different. Now high case counts are spreading from the South East into the rest of the country. We don't know whether we can eve…

I don't disagree, but it would be really nice if we could classify lockdowns better. The original lockdown furloughed a LOT of workers, closed schools and closed virtually all shops. Today's "super tier 4+ lockdown" doesn't seem to apply to shops at all (my local shops were all open this morning, is wrapping paper really an "essential"?). Workers are mostly going in. Schools that have remained open unless they alread…

As a programmer / software engineer, I've found that I often look for equivalency with policy and whatnot, because it seems like there are lots of similarities.

The impression that I get from my country (The Netherlands) is that we are doing a bit better than the UK for reasons that nobody quite understands yet. The best I can guess is that we ultimately make 'bigger' choices comparatively, even though compared to many other EU countries we're not doing particularly well despite being one of the richer ones.

The way I see it, our country is run by technocrats who are faced with something very different and new. Like with projects I've worked on as a programmer, the best solution often involved going way off course. And like with projects I've worked on, this usually didn't happen.

Solutions were conservative, even if something more drastic seemed prudent to almost everyone involved. It's really fucking hard to rewrite some of the core code. So instead we address things further away from that core with all sorts of special cases.

If anything, the pandemic has shown that our current way of doing things isn't quite equipped to deal with big upsets, and considering the future this is something we should probably prioritize dealing with somehow.

Re: New coronavirus variant: What do we know?

#280

Post by robbiep »

sjg007 wrote: post #184
robbiep wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe but these variants can arise spontaneously as well, probably as a function of the immune response.

There are a couple of problems with this line of reasoning - yes, as an RNA virus, there is a high rate of mutation. However because of the redundancy of amino acid encoding most mutations will be preservative (ie produce the same protein). Additionally, although there is no reason that chance can’t produce the exact same spike protein mutation in another location in the world, it will be of a different lineage which will clearly show up on sequencing as there will be some clear differences elsewhere (in the preservative mutations). This is highly unlikely to be a result of immune response pressure, in fact I would discount this entirely, mutations arise as a response to copying errors and inside an infection cycle (initial infection, replication, transmission, adaptive immune response).

The final immune response will shut down the virus ability to replicate freely due to recognition; selective pressure to avoid immune response is unlikely due to 1) the continually lowering viral load and 2) the very high number of non-selective antibodies produced that recognise a large number of viral epitopes.

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