171–180 of 280 posts
Based on the precedent of all other endemic human coronaviruses, there is reason to guess that the winning mutations will be less dangerous. This is also consistent with theory: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4873896/ > By far, the most widely studied trade-off involves transmission and virulence (Anderson and May, 1982; Frank, 1996; Alizon et al. 2009).
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Hence my enclosing Freedoms in single quotes. I tend to communicate quite drily - that's often hard to put across online.
I think you're exactly correct. It drives me nuts when people talk about freedom, they have no actual idea what freedom is or takes and their actions undermine it. Freedom doesn't mean "I can do whatever I like with no consequences", but that's what people really want. Freedom is just a better sounding word than selfishness these days :(
Very suspicious that this story breaks just as Boris needs to lock down the country over christmas. "everyone is going to hate me, quick think of something to blame.".... Eureka .... "There's a new virus strain, totally unforeseeable, don't blame me for the lock downs" Just sayin'
Why did he need to lockdown the country other than because of this? Given that he said 3 days earlier that this would be tantamount to "cancelling Christmas", and he now looks like a fool and a hypocrite for ridiculing the leader of the opposition over it, what possible benefit does he have to gain?
This was probably made worse by politicians because it's their natural instinct, but you'll see regular people trying to bargain like this too. "OK I know it's unsafe to do X, but I really wanted to, and so was extra careful to use hand sanitiser today".
The virus doesn't understand your proposed bargain, it's just (very complicated) chemistry, it is no more able to agree to a "deal" where you can spend Xmas opening presents with the extended family without getting COVID-19 so long as you promise not to stay overnight than a falling rock is able to spare your life because you prayed to Jesus.
One small piece of good news is that to a limited extent, and for some privileged people, technology made it possible to ignore these bad policies and enjoy much of the safety offered by sane policies despite living somewhere that had chosen to ignore them.
Anyway, the idea (which I'm not agreeing with) isn't that Boris knew the old plan (Xmas week doesn't need rules) wouldn't work, and concocted this story to cover for the fact that he'd need to U-turn rather than just never issuing the obviously bad policy, nor that this new strain is the only reason it's out of control and the old policy wouldn't work. Instead the idea is Boris was disappointed to hear that scientists (who've said all along that couldn't work) are right and it's going to drown the NHS in patients, likely resulting in staggering death tolls around New Year - and once he understood that he wanted an excuse to U-turn for which a new strain provides a convenient excuse.
Boris always looks like a fool. It's a big part of how he got elected. British people think he's a charming buffoon. Under current plans he has several years for them to forget he killed their parents or grandparents before they get the chance to kick him out directly, although it's the nature of Tory party politics that Boris isn't likely to survive that long.
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-…
Some points they made:
"It's a variant. It's not a strain. A strain is a virus with a new biological property. There have been no new properties ascribed to this isolate other than sequence differences, which is not enough to make a strain.. nor have we seen any other new strains of SARS-CoV-2 that anybody's demonstrated to be biologically different. None. It hasn't happened yet. I'm not saying it couldn't but it hasn't."
"Nobody's done any experiments to determine the effects of these changes on any property of the virus. Yet when a journalist calls up a scientist and say "What do you think?" and the scientist says "These could have an effect on virulence or transmission or antibody neutralization," somehow that gets translated in to "It's making the virus more virulent" and that's what's circulated and a dozen people this week said to me "What do you think about these mutations in the UK that make the virus more virulent, more transmissible, more resistant to neutralization by antibodies?" None of that has been shown, folks! It's speculation. There's no paper on any of this."
[1] - Starting at about 54 minutes in to episode 696: https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-696/
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Not really. Thousands of variations have ben sequenced, the notable thing here is the (potentially) faster spread.
Whilst the consensus seems to be that this variant is spreading faster than other variants - is there any information on exactly how it does so?
The talk of the virus potentially being on a path to vaccine escape is very worrying. Sounds like we might end up in a situation where we have seasonal COVID like we do with the flu :(
That was the endpoint regardless. Almost no one thinks this is going to be a smallpox situation where the vaccine is so effective that the virus gets eradicated. Almost certainly, covid is going to turn into an endemic disease just like everything else. Remember: all diseases were novel once! But most of the population will be immune, so outbreaks will be limited and spread slowly. Ideally that immunity will come via…
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-…
I realize that this is probably an unpopular opinion among techies but I really wish people would post information on a website and then link to it from Twitter. At the very least, double post it. I don't use Twitter and actively block it and Facebook's various websites from my router and VPN. Additionally, reading long threads on Twitter or back and forth replies for a non-regular Twitter user is taxing.
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https://twitter.com/The_Soup_Dragon/status/13403496399466291... If this chart is true EU countries announcing the closing borders the last couple of days is waaay to late to prevent the spread of the new strain in Europe.
Yeah, all the evidence seems to point to the border closures being a stupid, counterproductive attempt to close the stable doors after the horse has bolted and maybe shoot the messenger in the process. Unfortunately, there seems to be a bit of a push here in the UK to spin this as a necessary and inevitable measure that the government should have anticipated, including the closure of the border to road freight - whic…
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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.
My understanding is as long as the variant has the same spike protein, vaccines "should" remain effective. So while trials haven't been done yet to verfiy the vaccines are still effective, I'm assuming the spike protein has been observed to be the same so there's no reason to suggest vaccines wouldn't be effective. EDIT: Actually, sounds like a couple of the mutations are in the spike protein and there is some eviden…