Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

SARS-CoV-2 501Y.V2 escapes neutralization by South African COVID-19 donor plasma

biorxiv.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 131 posts

Re: SARS-CoV-2 501Y.V2 escapes neutralization by South African COVID-19 donor plasma

#71

Post by mc32 »

icedchai wrote: post #63
beamatronic wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you COORDINATE lockdowns and everyone works in harmony they can be very short. You could even schedule them in advance.

Getting everyone to work in harmony is basically impossible. If a politician goes on the news and say you need to stay home for 2 weeks starting next Friday, what do you thinks going to happen? Mass panic buying and looting? People refusing to do it because it's a conspiracy? Mass protest events encouraging super spreading? By the time this is all over, 2 weeks has passed...

China. A totalitarian state with massive centralization can’t get everyone to do things in unison. Imagine the rest of the world, save North Korea .

Re: SARS-CoV-2 501Y.V2 escapes neutralization by South African COVID-19 donor plasma

#72

Post by lhorie »

CyberRabbi wrote: post #32

Interesting... the common cold and the flu also tend to mutate to be resistant to past immunity. I wonder if we’re on a the cusp of finally finding cures for these types of rapidly mutating viruses.

I mean, if flu vaccines are any indication, what is more likely is we never cure it, but we end up with yearly covid shots to gain immunity to each year's strain(s)

Re: SARS-CoV-2 501Y.V2 escapes neutralization by South African COVID-19 donor plasma

#74

Post by x3n0ph3n3 »

dionian wrote: post #62
dougmwne wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are necessarily temporary measures. Life cannot go on forever with these restrictions in place. Either medical science will find a way to limit the danger or people will adapt to their new, more dangerous world. I am not an anti-masker, but asking for permanent social distancing is not realistic.

I think voluntary mask wearing becoming a new norm is fine with me

Masks are a major hindrance to communication.

1) People's voices become muffled

2) I can not read their lips

3) Emotional-facial cues are much harder to pick up on.

This cannot be a permanent state of affairs.

Re: SARS-CoV-2 501Y.V2 escapes neutralization by South African COVID-19 donor plasma

#75

Post by knowaveragejoe »

dkural wrote: post #69

Today Biontech also announced results showing induces a similarly strong immune response against the new variants, although I haven't read the details. .

Link?

Edit: If you're talking about this press release, I believe this is referencing a different variant.

https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-deta...

Re: SARS-CoV-2 501Y.V2 escapes neutralization by South African COVID-19 donor plasma

#76

Post by xeromal »

pickledish wrote: post #66
xeromal wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you speaking for literally every human?

Well, they said "fine with me ", so... no?

The idea of making every one wear a mask as the new social norm is "fine with them".

Re: SARS-CoV-2 501Y.V2 escapes neutralization by South African COVID-19 donor plasma

#77

Post by akiselev »

CyberRabbi wrote: post #32

Interesting... the common cold and the flu also tend to mutate to be resistant to past immunity. I wonder if we’re on a the cusp of finally finding cures for these types of rapidly mutating viruses.

The issue with the flu isn't that it rapidly mutates but that we can't quite predict which mutations will happen each season. Developing a vaccine for a new strain of the flu is pretty mechanical at this point but each seasonal flu vaccine is really a combination of three different strains that World Health Organization scientists predict will be the dominant strains causing the most damage (it gets reevaluated twice a year). The way that most people take the vaccine (a live but weakened version of the virus) it's impractical, even dangerous, to give them all of the strains at once so an educated guess of three strains is our chosen sweet spot.

The common cold is an even more extreme version of that process but we haven't figured out an economic way of developing rapid vaccine candidates for rhino/coronavirus strains like we have for the flu. Moderna's RNA method might be a game changer here but it'll take a while for their method to be approved as a platform instead of a single drug candidate.

Re: SARS-CoV-2 501Y.V2 escapes neutralization by South African COVID-19 donor plasma

#78

Post by randcraw »

dnautics wrote: post #54
zibbity-rw wrote: post #3

This is the one headline I’m constantly afraid of reading... do any HN biotech experts have any comments or feedback? Is this a serious cause for concern?

re: E484K 1) it's in the spike protein. I think it's in the area that typically elicits antigen response. That's super bad news. If you look carefully, it's near the cleft of a representative antibody (fig 1a), and the buried surface area is high across the board on (clinically?) sampled antibodies (fig 1e), suggesting its importance. 2) it's a mutation that changes the charge state of one of the amino acid residues.…

But CAN you safely reformulate vaccines to include this new protein and introduce it widely into the population without knowing if this protein's antigen is already present in the body and might cause severe side effects?

I think you can't. It's famously difficult to anticipate off-target effects of any novel antigen target. This can't be tested in-vitro. You have to repeat the full range of clinical trials with each reformulation that targets a new antigen.

Re: SARS-CoV-2 501Y.V2 escapes neutralization by South African COVID-19 donor plasma

#79

Post by nradov »

CyberRabbi wrote: post #32

Interesting... the common cold and the flu also tend to mutate to be resistant to past immunity. I wonder if we’re on a the cusp of finally finding cures for these types of rapidly mutating viruses.

The common cold isn't just one virus. Many different viruses cause cold symptoms, including several coronaviruses. In particular HCoV-OC43 is quite similar to SARS-CoV-2. If you're exposed to one of those common cold viruses then it generally won't give you immunity to any of the others.

Re: SARS-CoV-2 501Y.V2 escapes neutralization by South African COVID-19 donor plasma

#80

Post by pelagicAustral »

hinkley wrote: post #34
citilife wrote: post #27

I for one am not concerned. The true mortality rate appears to be 65. What does that mean? To put it into perspective you may only know one person in your friend group which knows one person who dies. Your friends / family are more likely to die of cancer. How often do you know someone die of cancer? It's definitely unfortunate; we should all socially distance & wear N95's where possible. All of us can decide if we w…

> How often do you know someone die of cancer? That depends on how many smokers and ex-smokers you know. It makes it all the sadder because the death was preventable. Which puts it into a similar headspace with Covid.

Because obviously only smokers die of cancer...
Post reply on HN