Yeah we seem to be whipsawing around a bit here. I don’t think we need to try to swing haymaker arguments here like this variant is the end of the world or this variant is a big hoax. There’s a lot of space in there that is more likely to be the truth. Maybe we should stick to the facts about what we know and are learning and not get into arguing about who said what.
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This is a political decision much more than a scientific one. Politicians want to look like they are doing something. If this is already in Belgium and Hong Kong, it’s very likely that it’s already in North America, or at least in a country that is not being restricted, so it’ll be here shortly. The question is how it competes with delta
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Yeah, if this is “the one” we are in no way ready. It’s a bit surreal to browse this thread and the emerging news about the variant while I enjoy my afternoon off watching a hockey game with a jam packed crowd in Boston. It’s not like we have the speed bumps in place to slow this thing down if needed.
We did this 24 hours ago. Scroll up a few hundred posts.
See the tweets / statements - search twists posts if mine are too numerous.
South Africa can’t find Delta anymore.
The real question is… ROW couldn’t find Beta and SA could, hopefully (for ROW anyway) this one’s the same (hence, travel restrictions)
Eh, I don’t think the travel restrictions are useless even if it is already here to some extent. This is always just trying to buy more time. If it is here in a limited fashion only, we could buy some time with the travel restrictions before it just completely explodes. OG Covid was in the US at least in January of 2020, maybe earlier, but didn’t really explode until March.
Good point.
50 amino acids like wookie said.
To answer another post there’s 1273 amino acids in the spike protein according to this.
When you see a [letter][number][letter] mutation, that’s shorthand for the amino acid it starts with, the position in the chain and the amino acid it’s been changed to. Each amino acid has a single letter that it can be abbreviated to. I know this because I had to memorize those stupid fucks at one point. I’m not 100% sure what order that shorthand is in it’s in but that’s the general structure.
Each amino acid is coded for as part of a ‘codon’. Each codon is 3 RNA/DNA sequences of G, C, T, A, or U. Changing one piece of DNA/RNA can change the amino acid… it can also cause no change.
The affect of the change in one amino acid is super variable. It can make a massive difference, especially if it changes how the overall protein is folded. It can also have no affect.
The thing that we got going for us is that covid has to hit a receptor that is conserved. What I mean by that is that it has to be able to bind to a specific receptor in the human body that isn’t changing, which limits the amount of change it can go through while still being effective at spreading as a coronavirus… It is possible, but very unlikely imo, that the virus will become essentially novel again by wholly evading immune responses to previous infections. If it does… well… it’s an utter disaster.
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These travel restrictions are close to useless I think. Quarantining all intl travelers for 14 days upon arrival until we know more and initiating trace and testing on recently arrived travelers would be somewhat useful.
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again, this may end up being correct eventually but is 100% wrong now.
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What? They’re still finding delta in SA.
Like the US is still finding Alpha in Guam?
a variant that can spread through vaccinated people, but only has grave outcomes for unvaccinated may as well be a natural mechanism against political polarization.
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can you not?
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Sure, but as previously posted multiple times:
https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1463956690743742470?s=20
It seems the blue in John’s chart has disappeared and replaced by red?
We’re always being preached at that it’s not the number of cases but the positivity rate - this time, to turn it back, it’s the strain not the 2 days worth of case numbers
Also, note it’s not half blue, half red, even in John’s chart
Thread Police out in force again I see 
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there’s still blue there.
this part of your post makes no sense. I have no clue what you’re trying to say.
Yeah I’m not on the panic train yet (although my gut says this is gonna be a problem of some sort here in early 2022) just wanted to add the source data so we could all be on the same page.
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Thanks, wookie, ikes, and churchill
Here’s why I’m confused. If someone says this:
Then I would, by default, assume that they are talking about 50 mutations in the nucleic acid sequence. 50 mutations in the nucleic acid sequence may or many not result in 50 changed AAs.
But if you all are saying that the 50 is the number of AAs that are changed, then do we know how many mutations there were in the RNA sequence?
None of this matters for much more than satisfying my curiosity.