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Mutated Covid-19 strain confirmed in Japan as case tally hits record high

japantimes.co.jp

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Re: Mutated Covid-19 strain confirmed in Japan as case tally hits record high

#121

Post by zajio1am »

GregarianChild wrote: post #75
sharken wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or acceptable in the free world, fact is that the virus has only successfully been contained in big brother countries and island states. The rest of the world can not (and should not) try to replicate the same behaviour.

What do you find objectionable about Taiwan's Covid response, taking into account its success, not to mention the cost (in a general sense) of quarantining whole countries (which means restricting the freedom of millions of health citizens), and then not being successful, unlike Taiwan? In 2020, my mother (and millions of other citizens) spent more time at home quarantined than she would have spent in prison, had she…

Taiwan (and some other countries) used phone surveillance location-tracking to enforce quarantines:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-taiwan...

That is like using ankle bracelets for tracking people under quarantine, just worse.

Re: Mutated Covid-19 strain confirmed in Japan as case tally hits record high

#122

Post by chki »

enraged_camel wrote: post #77
IAmGraydon wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The vaccine creates broad protection against the virus’s spike protein structure. If the virus mutated enough to evade this protection, it would have to develop a structure so radically different that it would likely no longer be able to attach to the ACE2 receptor. What is going on right now is mass anxiety. The vaccine is out, so humanity is imagining how things could still go wrong. The easiest thing to imagine is…

>> What is going on right now is mass anxiety. The vaccine is out, so humanity is imagining how things could still go wrong. Not enough anxiety, in my opinion. Tons and tons of people are still behaving as if everything is normal, or that they are somehow special.

The anxiety we are talking about here is exactly the kind of anxiety you _don't_ want. If there was no vaccine in the short/midterm future people would probably (and somewhat rationally) assume that everybody (or rather 60%) will get the disease at some point, which would mean that the reward for behaving cautiously now is a lot worse (at least on an individual level, it would still be necessary not to overwhelm hospitals or to protect certain high-risk-groups).

You might be inducing a "so-what" mentality where people don't want to refrain from going to bars and restaurants just to not catch a virus that's going to get them at some point.

Re: Mutated Covid-19 strain confirmed in Japan as case tally hits record high

#123

Post by fallingfrog »

rolph wrote: post #5
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #3

There are two important things to temper how worried you should be: 1. Many times there is an inverse relationship between ease of transmission, and severity of symptoms. There is a good chance that this new more transmissible mutant is likely to make people less sick. 2. So far all the available evidence seems to indicate that the vaccines will be effects against this strain as well.

[1] is a repeated concern, that has roots in early virology e.g myxomatosis and rabbits overpopulating australia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myxomatosis the coronavirus breaks past this dynamic as there is disjunction between transmission and onset of symptoms. thus morbidity is not a selective pressure upon transmisibility of the coronavirus.

Do you know this for a fact or is that just a plausible idea you came up with? It sounds plausible enough but it also sounds plausible that if symptoms were delayed even more or failed to show up at all it might be transmissible for longer, meaning that that there would still be selective pressure towards less virulent strains.

Re: Mutated Covid-19 strain confirmed in Japan as case tally hits record high

#124

Post by xg15 »

tomxor wrote: post #79
jsnell wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TWIW has kind of painted themselves into the corner by insisting that anything except biological evidence is irrelevant. The evidence for B.1.1.7 being more transmissive is quite solid, and seems to be getting more so as time goes on. But no matter how strong the statistical data is, it could never be good enough for them. So their policy recommendation ends up as "do nothing at all until there is 100% certain non-ci…

> The problem is that action now is way more valuable than action in 1-2 months [...] If there is a substantially more transmissive variant around, that will make it much harder to buy that time. But which action? I can see two class of possible cause that do not entirely overlap in response: A singular cause such as a strain; or fluctuations as the emergent behavior of a complex dynamic system. If incorrectly attrib…

What would be your advice we should do in the face of a system so complex it's impossible to understand or predict?

Re: Mutated Covid-19 strain confirmed in Japan as case tally hits record high

#125

Post by xg15 »

GregarianChild wrote: post #49
sigil wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What could we be doing differently beyond what we already should be doing? Are you referring to things like border closing?

Copy Taiwan. No country has been dealing better with Covid than Taiwan. No lockdown, and > 200 days without new Covid case [1]. Taipei had daily direct flights from Wuhan, and the Diamond Princess mooring near Taipei. They told the world early on [2] how they did it. Summary: Border closure, contract tracing, testing and controlled quarantine for those testing positive . It's worth reading [2] to realise how swiftly,…

This probably would have been good advice in late summer or early fall when contact tracing was still possible.

However now there seem to be so many diffuse infection events and undetected chains that the question is more about how to regain control. I'm not sure how this is achievable without contact restrictions.

Re: Mutated Covid-19 strain confirmed in Japan as case tally hits record high

#126

Post by ianai »

tomxor wrote: post #79
jsnell wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TWIW has kind of painted themselves into the corner by insisting that anything except biological evidence is irrelevant. The evidence for B.1.1.7 being more transmissive is quite solid, and seems to be getting more so as time goes on. But no matter how strong the statistical data is, it could never be good enough for them. So their policy recommendation ends up as "do nothing at all until there is 100% certain non-ci…

> The problem is that action now is way more valuable than action in 1-2 months [...] If there is a substantially more transmissive variant around, that will make it much harder to buy that time. But which action? I can see two class of possible cause that do not entirely overlap in response: A singular cause such as a strain; or fluctuations as the emergent behavior of a complex dynamic system. If incorrectly attrib…

Personally I’ve taken it to changing optimization tactics. I’m going to use pseudo-statistical language to illustrate my point so please try to be charitable. In a usual model I’d base my actions on the mean outcome for a given set of choices. For covid, I think it’s smarter to choose to minimize the maximum, worst outcome. Ie assume the absolute worst and react in the harshest way. This new strain may prove to be nothing major, but personally I’ve decided it’s wise to be even more distanced from possible disease vectors. I suspect this may be a good strategy in a universe in which an already rare occurrence has been observed, in a larger sense.

Re: Mutated Covid-19 strain confirmed in Japan as case tally hits record high

#127

Post by zbjornson »

mns wrote: post #31
jsnell wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TWIW has kind of painted themselves into the corner by insisting that anything except biological evidence is irrelevant. The evidence for B.1.1.7 being more transmissive is quite solid, and seems to be getting more so as time goes on. But no matter how strong the statistical data is, it could never be good enough for them. So their policy recommendation ends up as "do nothing at all until there is 100% certain non-ci…

Well, the preprint ( https://cmmid.github.io/topics/covid19/reports/uk-novel-vari... ) from the UK has this: >Third, we modelled increased susceptibility among children (aged 0-19) by assuming they could be as susceptible as adults (aged 20+) to infection by VOC 202012/01 given exposure. Basically they applied their own model on a lot of noise and data and assumed certain things. It's wild were we are at this point a…

You quoted the worst of the four models that they evaluated ("This model was the least parsimonious model we evaluated"), and only part of that model even. They're not pushing that sole hypothesis; they were testing to see if that could explain the current evidence.

The other models they tested were better:

> First, we modelled increased infectiousness as an increase in the risk of transmission of VOC 202012/01 per contact, relative to preexisting variants. This model was best able to capture the data parsimoniously among the four hypotheses tested...

Re: Mutated Covid-19 strain confirmed in Japan as case tally hits record high

#128

Post by nthj »

Pyxl101 wrote: post #115
GregarianChild wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you elaborate by which moral principle you come to the conclusion that a vague slippery slope and even more vague outrage is more important than stopping a pandemic with hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths? Most moral systems of my acquantance are based on a hierachy of values that puts saving human lives over just about anything.

I don't necessarily subscribe to this point of view (I don't know what I believe; I need to think more), but allow me to play devil's advocate consider: most of the people who die from this disease are old people who have already lived their lives. The young are giving up the opportunity to live their lives by staying home to stop the spread, when they predominately aren't at risk of death. Should the young give up t…

We’re asking people to stay home to help mitigate the collapse of health care systems, at which point the young will find that car crashes, heart attacks and strokes that they may have otherwise survive now become far more deadly.

Re: Mutated Covid-19 strain confirmed in Japan as case tally hits record high

#129

Post by khuey »

nostrademons wrote: post #98
SomeoneFromCA wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There must be some very special political reason for keeping borders with UK open, so even Fauci seem to approve it. I wonder what is it?

Makes it harder for doctors to get supplies if all the borders are closed. The UK has an upcoming COVID vaccine (the Astra-Zeneca/Oxford one) that may prove useful in the near future. Cut off the UK from the rest of the world and the rest of the world can't benefit from it. Also, it's almost certain that the UK strain is in the US already, and the US is shit at dealing with pandemics once they're on our soil. Border…

Nobody is talking about closing borders to cargo.

Re: Mutated Covid-19 strain confirmed in Japan as case tally hits record high

#130

Post by orblivion »

CWuestefeld wrote: post #96

How is this news at all? The virus has been mutating and throwing off different strains all along. There are entire websites devoted to tracking these, e.g., [1] Perhaps this is just the normal operation of American media to exaggerate the negative side of the situation? [2] [1] https://nextstrain.org/sars-cov-2/ [2] PDF link: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w28110/w281...

It's news if there's anything notable about the strain. More deadly, faster spreading, potentialy resistant to the vaccines.

So far UK and South Africa have two strains that are faster spreading (and hopefully that's the only difference). If there's nothing special about the one from Japan, I bet that this is just getting attention because the other two are in the news. Either news orgs jumping on a bandwagon or HN readers expecting that it's similar when it's not.

But maybe this one actually is notable too, I don't know.

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