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The virus has changed around once a month apparently
Viruses mutate all the time. COG-UK or some other group said they had identified 12,000 mutations back in July. Most mutations are short lived or have little/no consequence.
This new variant includes a mutation to the receptor binding of the spike protein, which is potentially significant.
Does beg the question of what the hell is going on in South Wales if they can manage this without any help (yet) from a new highly-transmissable variant.
There's a large amount of people who travel to London on a Monday and back to South Wales on a Friday normally. Even with reduced numbers there is a strong regular path for the virus to travel along.
Fully expecting Drakeford to announce further restrictions in the next day or two.
He already has RJ. Wales in Tier 4 from midnight.
Telegraph journalist showing he's not paying attention, "where did the new strain come from?" Looking for the brown people caused this excuse is how that reads to me! Vile creature.
@reluctantjumper....he's already announced lockdown from midnight tonight!
The old variant has hardly grown since mid November. New variant is crazy.
So what's the difference between tier 4 and lockdown then? Looks like a localised lockdown to me.
Churches are open so that you can pray away the virus
But they have just lied about the Porton Down data not being available. It is and my sister has read it.
Not as such of your source is right. It will mean it’s not available for public release.
So does this affect family bubbles? I'm on my own and had planned to visit my folks for Christmas and stay with them for the week, they live just down the road. To ensure my elderly folks won't be put at risk I had decided to 'quarentine' myself for 10 days before hand, no meeting my friends, going to shops etc.
So am I still allowed to go since scotland is going into full lockdown from the boxing day. I assume so, given my folks are in my bubble. Can anyone confirm?
Could the mutation also be able to survive on hard surface for longer and, or...
Take less cells to infect host
Become transmittal alot quicker
Resilient to ipa at current rate
Stay transmittable for longer in the shredder
Able to survive 'dry' or aerobically for alot longer
Have an increased rate of reproduction
Able to evade or suppress host autoimmune systems for longer
I am not an epidemiology person but know about killing tiny thimgs and this seems possible to me
@Tom-B - yep, didn't think it would be that quickly so missed the announcement. Was expecting it tomorrow.
Does beg the question of what the hell is going on in South Wales
Gavin and Stacey
This isn’t good - there’s no evidence yet that it will reduce the effectiveness of the vaccines but I wouldn’t rule it out.
Boris should have put the South into Tier 3 along with the rest of us. The **** did they expect, encouraging the highest density part of the UK to carry on using the tube and going out for a drink.
Looks like my mum in law alone for Xmas?!
I think that support bubbles still count as one household, so if you’re not bubbled with somebody else you can still see her
Boris should have put the South into Tier 3 along with the rest of us.
Kent has been in T3 since nationwide lockdown ended.
Seems like it didn’t work. We were blaming the Kentish for acting poorly but it seems that was unfair now that a new strain has been found responsible
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So what’s the difference between tier 4 and lockdown then? Looks like a localised lockdown to me.
Quite a difference*, no limit on amount of times you can exercise, still loads of pointless shops open - DFS, garden centres and the likes. Lockdown wasn't really a lockdown, this is less so.
* We're not long out of 3 weeks of tier 4.
Kent has been in T3 since nationwide lockdown ended.
Seems like it didn’t work. We were blaming the Kentish for acting poorly but it seems that was unfair now that a new strain has been found responsible
Posted
Was it Kent that drove this or London though? If it was spreading in Kent rapidly under Tier 3 then the shit is really going to hit the fan.
Watch every nation on the planet ban people from entering from the UK.
This isn’t good – there’s no evidence yet that it will reduce the effectiveness of the vaccines but I wouldn’t rule it out.
A little science. The vaccine generates a response against spike protein. The mRNA vaccine is the genetic instruction to make that spike protein in some conformation that may bare some resemblance to the spike protein on the surface of the virus.
Your immune system makes not one single antibody but a polyclonal response. Some of those antibodies will be natural born killers that bind tightly, others are junk. Your response won’t be the same as mine. BUT they will already be testing the ability of neutralising serum from past donors to take out any strain. At least they should be!
For context, in the Lilly antibody study, 6% of people had strains resistant to their antibody. In Scotland there is a strain completely resistant to the RGN antibody. That’s MONOclonal antibodies for you. Vaccine responses (and infections) are POLYclonal, so less likely to have absolute resistance. There will be antigenic drift, and new vaccines will be needed. But the timeframe is likely to be years not months. Also past infections will leave some residual protection against severe disease.
[tl:dr] vaccines make polyclonal or wide ranging antibodies that take out many sites on the spike protein. Resistance is possible but it’s very early days.
I am not a fan of the PM but he has finally caught on that we can’t fudge this
I think a few people are giving him way too much credit - the Christmas relaxation looked wrong to anyone with half a brain a month ago, the data of rising infections and new strains of Covid was public at the beginning of the week.
He is continuing to fudge it at the last minute, thus allowing it to spread, for deaths to keep increasing, for longer stricter lockdowns to be required, and to **** up the economy completely. As he has done from the start.
Boris really is ****ing clueless isn't he? It's like lurching from one load of half-arsed restrictions to another at the drop of a hat with seemingly little planning or clue and not much in the way of enforcement either.
At least my Mum (in London) is OK, she's got some good neighbours who all look out for each other and she's fairly settled with the idea of a Christmas of video calls - in some respects I think she's actually quite glad that she doesn't have to travel to my sister's or put in any effort for Christmas!
[tl:dr] vaccines make polyclonal or wide ranging antibodies that take out many sites on the spike protein. Resistance is possible but it’s very early days.
I know this.
There have been some moderate reductions in the effectiveness of seasonal flu vaccines between the time they were in R&D to the time they were being distributed though, hasn’t there? I can’t remember what paper it was that I was reading - I’ll see if I can dig it out.
I don’t think now is the time to be telling ourselves “oh it’ll probably be alright - most mutations that cause vaccine inefectivity take a few years to occur”
You know as well as me it’s just a roll of the dice (probability) - just because it usually happens along in that timeframe doesn’t make it true for every case.
Keep the science coming…
With many different vaccines coming… talk of loss of effectiveness in the first year feels a bit alarmist. Having said that… if we dropped the policy of allowing “just enough spread that the NHS can just about cope”, and acted to get prevalence right down, and keep to keep it down, we’d be in a much better place… we have the tools to contain this virus, but not if we keep pretending that current infection rates are okay… because vaccines are coming… they are not okay, and they are crippling our society, and health service, and economy. We are spreading the virus, we should stop doing so.
You know as well as me it’s just a roll of the dice (probability) – just because it usually happens along in that timeframe doesn’t make it true for every case.
True, but one needs some understanding of what is driving the mutations, and where antibodies bind. There’s been a lot of epitope mapping for the antibodies. Ours was identified from SARS-CoV-1 and does not bind to the RBD. Vaccination by inactivated virus may deliver a different response more akin to infection.
What will be interesting is whether the trend from cases to admissions to deaths is different in the South. That will take a few weeks to feed through. My suspicion is that pathogenicity is unchanged.
I think a few people are giving him way too much credit
100%. Can't believe the "fair play to him" type comments. Boris has done a terrible job since the start, particularly terrible recently, now he's playing catch up on the poor choices made so far.
If the current vaccines are rendered ineffective surely it’s just a case of reformulating to the new strain. It takes time, but hey we’ve done it before so this time will be quicker?
Can I point out whilst everybody (except Tired) is ranting and raving, that at the beginning of this, right back in March, we were told that the second wave which would come in winter, would be worse than the first wave. Hell we even had 1918 to illustrate it for us.
Yes politicians have messed up a lot, but so would you. Hell, I'd have opted for the herd immunity approach.
So now, yes, it's all pretty bad but looked at another way; you're not living in a refugee camp, you're not being bombed, you've not got a life expectancy of 30, your species isn't on the brink of extinction and your habitat hasn't been bulldozed to produce stuff to make filthy cheap muck to feed another species so it can proliferate across the planet and destroy everything.
Just saying.
What will be interesting is whether the trend from cases to admissions to deaths is different in the South. That will take a few weeks to feed through. My suspicion is that pathogenicity is unchanged.
Depends on whether there are selection pressures on pathogenicity - social distancing could act as such a pressure.
Just saying.
You are saying that there are far more dangerous places in the world. We all agree. That doesn’t excuse our PM for his continued failure to listen to those that know more than he about the importance of timing and that living with a high prevalence is far riskier than keeping prevalence low. A sudden spike in cases from a low base can be managed. A sudden spike in cases from a high base is far more problematic… Johnson made his choices, and the damage is on him. You might have suggested even worse actions… but others wiser than you or I told him what needed doing. No one should be back slapping him at this point. He should have already resigned. He’s hopeless.
Why are folks already worrying that the vaccine won't work? Im a worrier, but i try to worry about things that we know are an issue, not stuff that might be an issue, such as the vaccine now not working. Which there is absolutely no evidence of.
There's plenty enough bad shit going on to not have to conjure up fairly unlikely scenarios to get even more stressed about.
If lower infectious dose is a thing with the new variant, you'd hope for some mitigation in severity. But 2020 rules probably still apply, so TiReds assessment is most likely.
It just struck me that most of England is still in Tier 3. Would it not have been better to apply Tier 4 across the board (for a while at least)?
Tpbiker agreed, enough scaremongering as it is.
selection pressures on pathogenicity
This may change the relationship between cases and admissions, but probably not admissions and deaths. Hence one will look at the whole chain. I suspect it’s just ACE2 binding at the RBD since this is the epitope region most open to selection pressure and has been noted many many times. TMPRSS2 changes could be pathogenicity drivers.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867420302294
my wife advises me that mumsnet is now full of people saying they are packing up and going to their parents / family tonight so that they are gone before tier 4 kicks in. Jeez, don't think they get it.
Jeez, don’t think they get it.
Well that's been the problem all along. A post cropped up on my FB because a Brexity friend of mine had commented on it, it was about a party in Liverpool being broken up by police, people fined etc and the thread was full of people saying
"it's just a cold"
"it's got a 99.5% recovery rate"
"it's all a scam so the Government can crack down on your rights"
"they should be out catching real criminals"
"I don't pay my taxes for the police to behave like this"
"we should gather outside the police station and protest"
There does seem to be a strong correlation between Brexiteers and Covid-deniers - maybe it's the anti-establishment thing? Won't have any of those experts telling US what's best, we've watched a video on YouTube and we're all experts!
“it’s got a 99.5% recovery rate”
I’m always intrigued by this statement. Whilst factually correct, people ignore the fact that the 0.5% is about 330,000 additional deaths spread over the duration of the pandemic. That’s not an insignificant number. 175,000 per year would be pretty awful. We’ll squeeze under 100,000 excess deaths in 2020 in England and Wales. Perhaps two thirds down to COVID19.
The statement also fails to factor in morbidity, with about 10% of patients having ongoing symptoms. My symptoms are now an inability to put down more than 200w on Zwift. I am so unfit...
I remember friends back in the UK going out for "one last big night out" before pub restrictions kicked in last time.
As I’ve said previously, Boris Making a u-turn on Christmas will reduce compliance in the long term. People will feel safer breaking the rules in numbers and that will carry on into the new year. People are losing the feeling of being tied into a social contact. The poverty/unemployment, morale drop due to Christmas cancellations and Brexit disorganisation/fallout is going to lead to unrest.
I remember friends back in the UK going out for “one last big night out” before pub restrictions kicked in last time.
I guess that's why its kicking in so quickly. Although everything is already shut in those areas anyway.
“it’s just a cold”
“it’s got a 99.5% recovery rate”
“it’s all a scam so the Government can crack down on your rights”
“they should be out catching real criminals”
“I don’t pay my taxes for the police to behave like this”
“we should gather outside the police station and protest”
Police have threatened a £10,000 fine to a local guy trying to organise a rave this weekend. My favourite odd FB response was from someone saying that the Police "need to remember they don't work for a corporation"
Maybe the potential for mutations is an argument to put to those who say 'protect the vulnerable and let the rest catch it'. The more infections there are the more risk of a dangerous mutation. But on second thoughts, forget the idea, they're not interested in logic.
Looks like Johnson's attempt at containing the new strain of covid has probably failed
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/traffic-tier-4-london-south-east-b1776612.html