211–220 of 291 posts
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Barring post-Thanksgiving spikes, cases in the US Midwest have been dropping since mid-November. And the spikes didn't even show up in all those states. Seems like places are getting past the peak already despite the temperature still dropping.
In Germany they've been rising despite the lockdown light.
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What could we be doing differently beyond what we already should be doing? Are you referring to things like border closing?
I feel we (US) should absolutely be closing the border to the UK, Japan, Italy and whoever else has the new strain/variant. Why would we wait on this when the evidence suggests the new version is more infectious?
What happens if the world gets into a situation where the virus mutates rapidly and we find the vaccines becoming less effective? We assume the drug companies will be able to adapt the vaccine quickly to the new variants. If this happens then it creates a few problems.. One problem is having to continuously distribute a new vaccine to people indefinitely. Another problem is only certain countries are capable of manuf…
We already do this for influenza.
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Er should avoid meaningless terms like “lokdown light” and just say that we closed bars and restaurants and told people not to meet in private, which was largely ignored.
I agree we should have closed shops after this didn't work and then schools if that still hadn't worked. But they didn't course correct for 4 weeks where it was obviously not working. But the people I know kept to the private rules as much or as little as during the first lockdown, which seemed to work despite keeping public transport open. Which would enable similar transmissions as shops and schools.
if schools are open, it's pointless doing anything else. if schools are closed kids will still go out and play.
basically you're screwed if you do and screwed if you don't. and less and less people will listen as time goes on while the virus mutates and selects for contagious variants.
As discussed on TWiV yesterday, B.1.1.7 isn't a "strain," which has demonstrably different biological properties, but is still considered a "variant." https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-697/ Any biological differences are theorized solely from the genome at this point. In the episode, Racaniello is at pains to point out that genomic differences alone don't imply biological differences in say transmission, and things li…
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> 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…
> But which action? In the UK, my view is the action to take was very clearly to dial back the public's expectations of having a 5 day "free for all" period of relaxation of our restrictions over Christmas. This 5 day period, as originally planned, was going to lead to massive cross-country travel, plenty of it being completely unnecessary, with no doubt a lot of risk taking in the spirit of "it's Christmas" and an i…
Honestly, I think people are being incredibly relaxed about the fact that lockdown restrictions are incredibly expensive to the mental health of swathes of the population. I am not claiming that letting covid kill more people would be better - but I wish there was more acknowledgement of the fact that it is a trade off, and that the goal is getting society in the best shape out the other side of this. Not just the largest one.
It is difficult to know what sources of information to trust. I already have antibodies, and thought I would be ok for a while. If this is a new strain, how would they know to make a vaccine for it, and how many vaccines will I need each year? Also, the article here says "case count". I'm really interested in the count of "excess deaths".
The current vaccine is a new technology, which codifies the spike protein in mRNA. SAR-COV-2 works by using their spike protein to attach to your body's ACE2 receptors, This new vaccine time is targeting something that is invariant and integral to SAR-COV viruses (the spike protein which gives it entrance) and almost certainly covers the new variant
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Sigh, this old canard again. Vietnam, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Singapore are all doing fine without "locking people into their homes" and they're not islands. (Ok, Singapore technically is an island but it's connected to Malaysia by the world's busiest border crossing; and Thailand's grappling with a new outbreak now but it seems to be improving.)
Look at the demographics of these countries and compare them to the United States and Europe. Throw in less detailed reporting and less transparency. We’re dealing with a virus that overwhelmingly affects old, obese people. A country like Vietnam probably wouldn't even notice the pandemic wave that currently affects Europe and the United States.
Not to mention that after the first couple of months, Covid cases are now nicely distributed amongst younger populations as well. Fatalities are still concentrated in older people, but cases are still widespread across demographics.
The facts are staring everyone in the face: when countries started weakening their lockdown procedures, cases started going back up. And nobody's been willing to go back in full lockdown, for various reasons. And so cases are going up a bunch.
Meanwhile Vietnam had some cases in fall/winter, and _immediately_ locked stuff down, shut down universities, and quarantined people who had even a bit of contact with people in positive cases. The stuff was taken seriously, and numbers stayed low because of it.
Maybe the US and Europe "can't do it" because of a lack of political will etc. But it's not physically impossible.
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Note that here we're not talking about a single mutation but 17 non-synonymous (they change the protein) mutations with 3-4 with known effects on the interactions of the resulting proteins
yes, and this is also not a surpise, this is part of the character of this virus, the sequence is unstable due to size and due to RNA instability.
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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?
What I’ve seen discussed is that closing borders only works if it’s done totally and immediately. Otherwise, it just slows response and causes super spreader events like we saw early this year in the US.