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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?

#21

Post by occamrazor »

robhu wrote: post #16

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-…

Direct link to the thread where he explains why the evidence, although not conclusive, strongly supports a higher infectivity of the new variant: https://mobile.twitter.com/jcbarret/status/13407169016101724...

Re: New coronavirus variant: What do we know?

#22

Post by spuz »

raphaelj wrote: post #11
spuz wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes variants occur all the time but they don't tend to become dominant. This variant went from 30% of all infections in November to 60% three weeks later. In order for a given variant to supplant all the others and become dominant it must have some characteristics that make it more transmissible. That is why they are particularly worried about this variant.

Could it still be that this variant is as infectious as others, but just happens to be the dominant one in the regions where the virus circulates the most, for reasons that have nothing to do with the genetics of the virus? London and the South East are some of the densest populated areas in the UK, and one could expect exponential growth of infections there while other less populated areas could manage to keep their…

I don't know enough about epidemiology but I would imagine they have done modelling to determine the likely transmissibility or R number of this new variant to be 70% higher. The probability that this new variant has come to dominate by pure chance must be small.

You are right that London is a densely populated area prone to easy spread for the virus but the same must be true for all variants. This variant started its existence as a single strand of viral DNA and has managed to spread far enough to become the dominant strand against competition from many other well established variants.

Re: New coronavirus variant: What do we know?

#23

Post by occamrazor »

raphaelj wrote: post #11
spuz wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes variants occur all the time but they don't tend to become dominant. This variant went from 30% of all infections in November to 60% three weeks later. In order for a given variant to supplant all the others and become dominant it must have some characteristics that make it more transmissible. That is why they are particularly worried about this variant.

Could it still be that this variant is as infectious as others, but just happens to be the dominant one in the regions where the virus circulates the most, for reasons that have nothing to do with the genetics of the virus? London and the South East are some of the densest populated areas in the UK, and one could expect exponential growth of infections there while other less populated areas could manage to keep their…

This variant was not dominant in London some weeks ago, and now is.

Re: New coronavirus variant: What do we know?

#24

Post by Mvandenbergh »

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?

Sure, there's constant mutation and most of it is phenotypically meaningless. What caused the concern is that this particular set of mutations seem to be associated with a part of the country where the measured dose-response of lockdown measures suddenly went way down. In other words, the effectiveness of a particular set of lockdown measures seemed to suddenly go down in Kent and London but not other parts of the country including parts of the country that had previously shown similar responses to lockdown measures. Either everyone in Kent is suddenly breaking the rules more than people elsewhere, this is unfortunate random variation driven by a few super spreading events (totally possible), or this is the first phenotypically distinct variant (as opposed to irrelevant sequence mutations) which has emerged.

Let's hope it's nothing but I'm glad that measures have been taken now.

Re: New coronavirus variant: What do we know?

#26

Post by glitchc »

JetSetWilly wrote: post #5
zpeti wrote: post #3

There's so many questions that this raises. - Is it more infectious or just bypasses current immunities? - Will the vaccines basically be voided by this? - Is it less lethal? Could it create more general immunity in communities without killing? - Has is spread yet? I've read the UK gov knew about this in october... seems like it's probably everywhere by now

> Will the vaccines basically be voided by this? It has been around since September - if vaccines were voided it would have shown up in trials. It seems the human immune system is pretty smart and manufactures many different antibodies against many different sites on the spike protein. So even if some parts of the spike protein mutate, you still have antibodies that will do the job. - Is it less lethal? Could it crea…

Voided as a term doesn’t make sense. The vaccine will be less effective for sure, correlated to the distribution of the variant vs. the original strain in the population.

Re: New coronavirus variant: What do we know?

#27

Post by imeron »

makomk wrote: post #15
zpeti wrote: post #3

There's so many questions that this raises. - Is it more infectious or just bypasses current immunities? - Will the vaccines basically be voided by this? - Is it less lethal? Could it create more general immunity in communities without killing? - Has is spread yet? I've read the UK gov knew about this in october... seems like it's probably everywhere by now

It seems the answer is that we don't know if it's spread yet. To quote the ECDC's briefing, "However, most EU/EEA countries sequence much smaller proportions of virus isolates than the UK, so ongoing circulation of this variant outside of the UK cannot be excluded". https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/sites/default/files/documents/SAR... Basically, the UK is just better set up to detect variants like this than a lot of other…

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.

Re: New coronavirus variant: What do we know?

#28

Post by spuz »

DoingIsLearning wrote: post #20
spuz wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It has been around since September - if vaccines were voided it would have shown up in trials. The variant didn't reach a significant proportion of infections until November. Evaluation of the efficacy of the Pfizer vaccine was done in July and August. We don't have data to understand how effective the Pfizer vaccine is against this variant yet.

This should be the official position when communicating this information. There simply is not enough data at this point. I was really shocked to read German Minister statements saying the vacine is still effective for this variant. Sure theoretical the spike is majority unchanged but there is no evidence or data for a government official to make such an absolute statement.

The official message from the UK government when they announced concern about this new strain was "we have no evidence to suggest that the Pfizer vaccine is not just as effective against this new strain". Somehow that gets twisted by some people into "we believe the vaccine is just as effective against this new strain". I think it's party due to not wanting to appear to be doomsaying but also very misleading in terms of communicating the facts.
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