All of Australia’s other states and territories are now requiring 14-day quarantine for anyone who has been in Greater Sydney. The NSW Premier will make a decision in 24 hours’ time as to what the family gathering rules will be over Christmas. The cluster is only 83 cases but not well understood and traced (for example, they still don’t know who patient zero was).
I don’t know if forum members are still entirely covid-free, but I now personally know two people who have it. Both are in their 80s with other risk factors. One got it from his caregiver, whose own 89 yo mother died from it. The other probably at a facility where they do imaging.
You really have to hand it to Donald Trump. He really is GOAT, if you think about it. With little more to work with than his own ignorance and contempt for knowledge, he turned the US into a shithole where you can’t touch own your face because you might die.
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I hope they can just change the mRNA sequence, do an abbreviated trial and just go with the updated formula to account for antigen drift. Like 3-4 months to cycle the update version that covers the dominant strain(s).
Is the US spot testing for this new UK variant?
Pure speculation, but if the variant is in fact quite a bit more transmissible, it seems like it could explain the sudden explosion in California, for instance. They went from flatlining for weeks to 10x the caseload in under 60 days.
I have to assume if it has spread widely in the UK, then it’s all over the US by now.
And it also seems to be the strain behind this Sydney outbreak/lockdown.
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Nope. A couple cases here have that strain but they flew in from the UK and are in quarantine. The Sydney outbreak is not the UK strain.
California has had lax restrictions for months before this outbreak, it didn’t come out of nowhere.
I’m baffled at all the talk about this new strain. It doesn’t seem to make sense, and it’s not like the patterns have been up trending for months are suddenly new. It’s not like Western Europe just suddenly started having problems when this new strain came to be. I don’t see anything different with this wave than prior waves tbh.
The most likely explanation, by far, is that restrictions allowed R0>1, and then exponential growth took place.
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One of the point mutations in the UK strain, N501Y, has arisen independently in South Africa and researchers there also say it appears more transmissible.
I think it’s very, very unlikely that the UK strain (designated B.1.1.7) is not much more transmissible. The reason is that it carries a very unusual number of mutations, several of them in the spike protein:
The B.1.1.7 lineage carries a larger than usual number of virus genetic changes. The accrual of 14 lineage-specific amino acid replacements prior to its detection is, to date, unprecedented in the global virus genomic data for the COVID-19 pandemic. Most branches in the global phylogenetic tree of SARS-CoV-2 show no more than a few mutations and mutations accumulate at a relatively consistent rate over time. Estimates suggest that circulating SARS-CoV-2 lineages accumulate nucleotide mutations at a rate of about 1-2 mutations per month (Duchene et al. 2020).
And this clade spread extremely rapidly through the UK:
In a press conference on Saturday, chief science advisor Patrick Vallance said that B.1.1.7, which first appeared in a virus isolated on 20 September, accounted for about 26% of cases in mid-November. “By the week commencing the 9th of December, these figures were much higher,” he said. “So, in London, over 60% of all the cases were the new variant.”
It’s extraordinarily unlikely this clade was selected by chance because it would mean that a new variant becoming rapidly dominant - a reasonably rare event - happened completely by chance to be a variant that carries an extremely unusual number of mutations in critical genes. To put it another way, if this new dominant variant were plucked by chance from the pool of new available variants, it is overwhelmingly likely that the new dominant variant would have only one or two mutations, just because that’s numerically the vast majority of new variants available to choose from.
So, does this new strain seem like it will also be susceptible to the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines?
Sure I get all that, this new strain is being sold as a reason for a shutdown though and that doesn’t seem to match up well. At least to me at least, this is out of my comfort zone
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Don’t think anyone has any idea. Usually point mutations aren’t that big a deal, the protein conserves its basic shape because it has to in order to function, and if the basic shape is conserved then it should work much the same as an antigen. When viruses mutate and vaccines become ineffective it’s usually a recombinant virus, the accumulation of many small mutations, or a big mutation like a frameshift.
That’s the theory. Having several mutations all in one go makes it a bit more likely to be an issue. I’m not an expert but would have the vaccine continuing to work as a solid fave. I’m assuming someone will do a study in some monkeys or something and see how that goes. Computer modelling is not accurate enough to figure out the effect of something this subtle, you just have to fuck around and find out.
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Read this everyone. Easy to understand stuff on the new mutation from a solid source
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WSJ just published an article that’s infuriating.
Gist of it is a claim that we intubated people not because that’s what we thought was best, but instead it was to control the spread of the disease. That doc from Michigan can fuck right off. We intubated early because we thought that people who couldn’t tolerate a nonrebreather were going to need intubation at some point, so you might as well do it before they had no oxygen reserve.
This type of bullshit is going to be a source of conspiracy nonsense.
I’m struggling with how you even think this. Maybe they’re mistaking how we avoided non invasive ventilation at first because it was thought to be the reason so many HCWs died. That’s why all the people in Italy had their heads in bubbles.
That was over in late March. My assignment in April was volunteer only precisely because I worked in a room with nothing but non invasive ventilation going on.
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Key part imo:
The new variant has mutations to the spike protein that the three leading vaccines are targeting. However, vaccines produce antibodies against many regions in the spike protein, so it’s unlikely that a single change would make the vaccine less effective.
Over time, as more mutations occur, the vaccine may need to be altered. This happens with seasonal flu, which mutates every year, and the vaccine is adjusted accordingly. The SARS-CoV-2 virus doesn’t mutate as quickly as the flu virus, and the vaccines that have so far proved effective in trials are types that can easily be tweaked if necessary.
Peacock said, “With this variant there is no evidence that it will evade the vaccination or a human immune response. But if there is an instance of vaccine failure or reinfection then that case should be treated as high priority for genetic sequencing.”
The bolded is stuff we’ve been discussing. Also:
SARS-CoV-2 is an RNA virus, and mutations arise naturally as the virus replicates. Many thousands of mutations have already arisen, but only a very small minority are likely to be important and to change the virus in an appreciable way. COG-UK says that there are currently around 4000 mutations in the spike protein.
The bolded here is reassuring - there have already been a ton of mutations in the spike protein and none appear to have rendered the vaccines ineffective.
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In my humble opinion, the WSJ should not be read for any credible information related to Covid or the vaccines or just about anything. Its news stories are crappy and their opinion pieces are worse.
https://twitter.com/CNN/status/1340318450527432704
The sticks-in-the-mud in the comments make me sad.
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https://twitter.com/firefoxx66/status/1340359989395861506?s=20
https://twitter.com/firefoxx66/status/1340360004621230081?s=20
If you had to argue this much about it there was no way they were actually going to follow through by the way.
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This seems real bad
“Barbara Hughes, a cashier at a Food 4 Less in Palmdale, said she had to put in 70 hours last week because so many of her colleagues are out with COVID-19. Twenty-one employees have recently tested positive for the virus, according to county records.”
“Every single one of my managers has COVID — one of them is really sick,” said Hughes, 61. “It’s stressful, but I just tell myself: ‘You gotta go. You gotta work.'”
Fuuuuuuuuck
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Yeah the article is annoying. My hospital was treating early covid patients with the same protocols as ards patients in the beginning. There wasn’t a protocol for keeping someone with severe ards on bipap. There sure as hell wasn’t a permissive hypercapnia protocol for bipap or hfnc.
We trialed patients on bipap and if they couldn’t maintain co2 we tubed them like we would anyone else. If they couldn’t maintain a P/F >1.5 on a hfnc or bipap they got tubed just like any other patient. Now we are more permissive about what we will allow before a patient gets put on a vent.
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