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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

#141

Post by throwaway2245 »

laydn wrote: post #32

People appear to be expecting there will be "weaker" variant/strains/mutations of this virus as time goes on. I am not sure why this is the mainstream thought. Shouldn't these viruses get selectively better at fighting human immune systems? And we're throwing 750.000 new hosts to this virus worldwide every day.

The most-efficiently-replicating strain is likely to dominate in the long-term. As such, there is essentially no evolutionary advantage to killing or harming humans outside of the goal of replicating more efficiently. (There is also no evolutionary disadvantage).

So, there are two suggestions within viral genetics:

1. Mutations which are kinder to the immune system might be able to spread relatively easier. As noted in the other comments, this is likely dependent on human behaviour and ritual around illness and death.

2. Significant mutations which spread more efficiently are perhaps more likely to knock-out genes causing harm (lost to 'evolutionary cost') than to enhance those genes.

Neither of these are completely guaranteed, but they are generally seen as likely.

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

#142

Post by XCSme »

auslegung wrote: post #40
laydn wrote: post #32

People appear to be expecting there will be "weaker" variant/strains/mutations of this virus as time goes on. I am not sure why this is the mainstream thought. Shouldn't these viruses get selectively better at fighting human immune systems? And we're throwing 750.000 new hosts to this virus worldwide every day.

I don't know much, just read a few things here and there, but viruses can get less lethal as they mutate because a virus doesn't want to kill its host, it wants to spread. Killing the host usually prevents spread.

I don't think the virus "wants" anything at all, it's just that if the host dies fast there is no time to spread, so statistically speaking it is less likely to spread and survive.

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

#143

Post by InTheArena »

tailspin2019 wrote: post #102
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…

> TWIW has kind of painted themselves into the corner by insisting that anything except biological evidence is irrelevant. I definitely don't know enough about this topic to say you're right, but as an avid layman listener of TWIV for 8+ months now, I've recently started thinking along the same lines. With the greatest of respect, Vincent Racaniello, while being clearly a true expert in the field, tends to take a ver…

As a long term listener of TWIV (4 years, IIRC), I think the service they have done for the community is priceless, especially once Daniel Griffin started doing his clinical updates. That said, I remember when COVID first started hitting, and their reaction was initially "meh", then like everyone else, it started to dawn on them how bad this was going to be. So still take their voices with a grain of salt.

In the latest TWIV, their comment was that the things you would do to prevent COVID are the same no matter if it is a new Strain or not. That's true - but we also have to deal with a increasingly uncomfortable truth - in many places, the COVID incident and death rate are pretty much the same, despite dramatically different legal and social dictates around masking, etc. Italy, France, USA, UK, Spain, Belgium, etc are all within 10% of the total death per million population, for example.

There is a weird cycle around COVID. Everyone reports on how awful it is somewhere, people draw a over-broad conclusion about the moral or scientific failures of the continent / state / country / red state / blue state, then that wave of covid waxes in one place, and wanes is another, and the cycle repeats again.

This pattern continues despite different travel restrictions, different masking policies (way less then my state in the USA, for example), etc.

SO I think the answer is not - we couldn't change anything - but rather - what is really the science behind this - and do we truly understand what is going on? I get that Vincent is burned out and has a knee jerk reaction, if I had to deal with all the insanity around the Hydrochloroquine crap I would be too.

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

#144

Post by klondike_ »

DebtDeflation wrote: post #84

Has there ever been any genomic sequencing done to pinpoint what made SARS and especially MERS so much more deadly than SARS-CoV-2?

The lethality of a virus is inversely proportional to its transmissibility. In other words, a virus won't spread very far if it kills its host.

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

#145

Post by tomxor »

jsnell wrote: post #89
tomxor wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

That seems like just a fancier way of expressing TWIV's "we can't possibly know anything without lab experiments that establish the exact mechanisms, so we should do nothing" philosophy. The undeniable fact is that this variant has successfully replaced other already highly prevalent variants. That needs to be explained somehow. Could it be a founder effect? No. Could it be random chance? No. Of course a stochastic p…

> how are we supposed to reason about something that vague? [...] I feel that anyone proposing that it's just emergent behavior should be at least a little bit more specific.

Sometimes it rains when we predicted it wouldn't, sometimes we get a full blown storm we didn't see coming... And that's using advanced techniques developed over decades on a continually available complex system for which there is demand to be able to predict on a daily basis. The very nature of these things is to have unpredictable behavior... That does not mean we necessarily do not understand the governing rules, but that the emergent behavior is not reducible into a simplified description.

> We have a simple explanation that's consistent with the known facts

It's simple and correlated, but highly suspect when a significant degree of chaos adds massive error bars to the significance of that correlation.

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

#146

Post by throwaway2245 »

rq1 wrote: post #36
laydn wrote: post #32

People appear to be expecting there will be "weaker" variant/strains/mutations of this virus as time goes on. I am not sure why this is the mainstream thought. Shouldn't these viruses get selectively better at fighting human immune systems? And we're throwing 750.000 new hosts to this virus worldwide every day.

They shouldn’t as they have no will whatsoever, nor it is “fighting” our immune system. If any (will), it shouldn’t be killing its host. These are anthropomorphic reasoning and antagonisms.

I know that some people consider it poor practice to anthropomorphise virus particles, but isn't this just an abstraction - a reasonable illustration - of what is happening?

What would you say instead, to capture these ideas, that are equally clear to everyone?

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

#147

Post by throwaway2245 »

napier wrote: post #74

B.1.1.7 bodes stealthily and percussively enough, but I propose it be re-designated the Great Barrington Variant.

Regarding Great Barrington: I wonder if we'll ever see people apologise for their contribution towards this mess.

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

#148

Post by orblivion »

jsnell wrote: post #135
orblivion wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 r…

This is not a report about a new variant, but that they found 5 cases of B.1.1.7 (the UK one) in Japan.

Thanks.

Well, then it's news because it means that Japan is now going to face, or has been facing, much faster spread than before.

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

#149

Post by brandonmenc »

laydn wrote: post #32

People appear to be expecting there will be "weaker" variant/strains/mutations of this virus as time goes on. I am not sure why this is the mainstream thought. Shouldn't these viruses get selectively better at fighting human immune systems? And we're throwing 750.000 new hosts to this virus worldwide every day.

> People appear to be expecting there will be "weaker" variant/strains/mutations of this virus as time goes on. I am not sure why this is the mainstream thought.

I remember the scientists telling us early on in the pandemic that mutations typically result in less lethal viruses.

Is this not the case?

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

#150

Post by irq11 »

scarmig wrote: post #100
starkd wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that's because it's an island. All the islands are doing better than whole continents. You can't contain it unless you go full bore like the chinese - locking people into their homes.

I find this argument unconvincing. The UK is an island, and it's doing badly. "But it's highly connected with the rest of the world, so it makes it honorarily a non-island!" Okay, sure. How about South Korea? It isn't an island, and it's doing pretty well. "But it's de facto an island, it's not getting cases from North Korea!" Okay, sure. But by that standard the US is an island: it didn't get its cases from Mexico o…

> How about South Korea? It isn’t an island, and it’s doing pretty well.

Cases are at all-time highs, and have pretty much escalated out of control:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2020...

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