New strain stuff.....

[MistressoftheDarkSide]

www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/18/boris-johnson-calls-crisis-meeting-to-discuss-response-to-new-covid-strain

So,it's just a variant, nothing to see here, blah blah blah..... I'm pretty sanguine about this stuff but dropping this late at night as a headline right now..... I'm getting mightily pissed off with the uncertainty and the subtle fear mongering......

Any thoughts?

@itsgettingweird

I've been going over the data and I just cannot get over the increase in cases in Essex.

Nearly every single council in Essex has doubled week-over-week - from levels that weren't low to begin with.

You can see it if you filter the county column on the table on www.covidmessenger.com and look at the weekly cases columns. I have also attached a screenshot.

@everythingthelighttouches

Thank you for the explaining.

It seems as though the vaccine arms of big pharma in Europe are concentrated in Belgium. If Pfizer is shipping by lorry, I wonder how long the does can be kept cold at the needed temperature while they may be stuck at the border. If it gets warm it will be all useless then I suppose.

@Gothamgirl1970 don't worry about the border thing's impact on the Pfizer vaccine, there are contingencies in place for it (even absent the latest development there had to be contingencies developed because of Brexit). It will be air freighted by military planes if it has to be.

“ Wtf is in this vaccine that requires-80c storage? I mean even the number-80c causes me panic”

www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/11/17/935563377/why-does-pfizers-covid-19-vaccine-need-to-be-kept-colder-than-antarctica

@littleowl1

I'm a subscriber to your service - I follow my area and my parents' area and have done since the summer. Both areas had numbers that went up from Sept to November to moderate levels (more than 100 cases per 100k). Then both areas went down during the November partial lockdown. Since we've opened back up cases have skyrocketed - more than doubling every 7 days - in our area. I can barely believe my eyes after seeing how it was behaving before. We've gone far higher than ever before in case numbers. Where my parents are (Devon), it's gone up a bit but not much at all.

I couldn't understand it - now I do. We're next to Tier 4 and our numbers aren't that different to a lot of the lower Tier 4 areas. I don't really understand why we're still in Tier 2. I'm pretty sure now it's must be the new variant that's driving it.

A new technical PHE report on the 'UK lineage' (B 1.1.7). Depending on modelling assumptions, the increase in the number of cases would be compatible with a relative increase in contagiousness between 37% and 75%.

Case Fatality Rate (CFR) of infections caused by the B 1.1.7 lineage has gone up slightly to ~0.6% (6/915) from a previous estimate of ~0.4% (4/915). This still looks in line (or below) the average UK #COVID19 CFR, but numbers are small and may go up due to the lag in deaths.

This should be considered as an intermediate update, which does not answer any of the key questions around the possible mechanisms by which the B 1.1.7 lineage may have gone up in frequency in the UK, nor does it shed much light on its biology.

Link to report (pdf) in tweet:

mobile.twitter.com/BallouxFrancois/status/1341147206506717187

@Gothamgirl - no you wouldn't suddenly die from Covid if you were asymptomatic. People who are asymptomatic have caught Covid very mildly. If you were going to die from it, you would get ill, and then much iller as your body mounts all its defences against the infection before you die.

It's true too that there is no evolutionary pressure on the virus to care if the mortality rate is 2%, 1%, 0.2% - because most transmission occurs earlier on, or by the large majority of people who don't die. However, mortality rates are related to overall severity. So if a virus became milder, the mortality rate might half - this in itself would be irrelevant to transmission, but if milder version had twice as many people who were asymptomatic or had minimal symptoms, then it would have an evolutionary advantage, because they'd be spreading it more. Doesn't seem any evidence yet that this new variant is any milder though.

@Gothamgirl1970 keeping genetic material at minus 80 is pretty standard to prevent degradation. All bio research labs are chock full of minus 80 freezers - in various states of disarray if my lab was anything to go by. There was some stuff in there older than me!

That's an interesting Twitter feed and article @coffee. What is the case fatality ratio for the UK? It's the proportion of diagnosed cases who die isn't it? Across the entire epidemic it works out about 3.5%, but obviously that's inflated by low rates of testing early on. More recent data still seems more like 2% though, from my rather rough calculations. I can't seem to find any published rate. Is there one? 0.4 or 0.6% sound quite low, though as the article notes, there may be a lag in the figures because of the newness of the new strain.

That's the thing about Covid. It's good that lots of (the majority) don't get very ill or even asymptomatic . Except it's not. Because it's also good for the virus.

It's having hit that sweet spot of being mild enough in many to spread, yet bad enough to kill in others that's made it so deadly @tobee

Not to mention the sweet spot of escaping from an animal host with enhanced capacity for infecting humans 👀

@Firefliess

That's an interesting Twitter feed and article *@coffee*. What is the case fatality ratio for the UK? It's the proportion of diagnosed cases who die isn't it? Across the entire epidemic it works out about 3.5%, but obviously that's inflated by low rates of testing early on. More recent data still seems more like 2% though, from my rather rough calculations. I can't seem to find any published rate. Is there one? 0.4 or 0.6% sound quite low, though as the article notes, there may be a lag in the figures because of the newness of the new strain.

In the EU note on this variant they mentioned that there was a suggestion the age profile of those included in the data skewed young, which would explain a lower IFR. And that fits with infectivity data I’ve seen for Kent recently, where school aged children and 20 somethings makeup a big chunk of cases.

Thank you everyone! I feel much better that -80 is pretty standard.

This isn’t scientific just a personal opinion

It’s driving me mad all these politicians boasting about 500,000 being vaccinated. They are partially vaccinated and as this was a rush job I understand that most drugs approved to be sold (FDA for example in America) need to go through a four phase clinical trial with a adverse event proof and being proven mathematically that it has a p value of 5 and for a mass use drug (let’s say a blood pressure tablet) the FDA has to really super check all results and etc before approving for sale because millions of people take blood pressure pills. So on a mass roll out of a potential world population saving vaccine I can understand the urgency to bring it to market but the 4 phases would have had to be extremely short and people haven’t had their second dose so I feel efficacy and safety are a bit on the under baked side at this point to be screaming victory, I would like to see (especially the 80 year old woman shown on tv as the first person getting dose #1 stay in fine fettle for the 28 day span until dose 2 and be tested negative, be in mixing in public (following whatever guidelines) and have her not test positive for covid for at least 3 months nor suffer any adverse effects of the vaccine before I think I will feel secure. Ok maybe not secure but not as scared shitless

Also (full disclosure I don’t have any DC sadly) but nieces and nephews, and I learned on this thread the age population that seems to be growing fastest in positives at the moment is 10-19 year olds, from which I infer (maybe stupidly) that having pupils return to school might have been a bad idea because it points to live classes being the source of these steep rise for that age demographic

TWIV guy thinks the UK is overblowing and misinterpreting the variant.

Deadly and puzzling @Firefliess. It's not like, after a short time, scientists have been able to say eg "oh well, it's only patients who have green eyes and are left handed that get the worst deserve"

Disease obviously 🙄

Nothing simple that can predict who gets the worse disease @tobee, no. Though they are increasingly starting to understand the role that genetics plays in determining who's gets most sick. They think they've identified some genes associated with immune systems going into overdrive. I think they'll probably get better at this in time.

@gothamgirl - the phase 3 trials did exactly that. They included all ages groups including old people and they followed many thousands of people over 3+ months after giving them two doses of each vaccine. They compared the numbers who caught Covid to the numbers who'd been given the placebo who caught Covid. They also monitored them very closely for side effects and found only minor ones. The only risks that these kinds of trials can't really pick up are risks to very tiny sub-groups (eg people with some rare condition or on some other medication) For those they just have to roll out the vaccine and ask patients and GPs to report any adverse reactions - this happened in the first week with a couple of allergic reactions (not severe - they recovered) causing a new rule not to give the Pfizer one to people prone to severe allergic reactions. They might potentially add other groups to this list if they uncover any more bad reactions, but any risks are miniscule and much less than the risks from Covid. They've assessed the risks from the vaccine to be less than the risks from catching Covid for anyone aged 16 or older. The risks from Covid are very low indeed for 16 year olds, so that means the risks from the vaccine are even lower.

@SRYnegative

TWIV guy thinks the UK is overblowing and misinterpreting the variant.

It may well emerge that we are but to be honest, with the data, definitely better safe than sorry.

Any mutations that changes the disease virulence (newly learnt word that Grant Shapps doesn't know) are entirely random.

It could happen with any of the 50,000 current strains at any time.

Changes to how contagious it is, does matter. As thereafter, future mutations could potentially (entirely accidentally) cause worse virulence.

So you then have a very contagious disease that is hidden in hosts for 48 hours, and in some completely hidden, which causes more devastation in some people than the previous one.

So any hint in data that one is becoming especially dominant (esp in small social germ spreaders!) should be taken seriously until the full picture is known.

Here is a map to show where all the mutations are.

@Gothamgirl1970 It seems as though the vaccine arms of big pharma in Europe are concentrated in Belgium. If Pfizer is shipping by lorry, I wonder how long the does can be kept cold at the needed temperature while they may be stuck at the border. If it gets warm it will be all useless then I suppose.

There is no issue with freight ENTERING the U.K. My DH was at the border yesterday and went in a ferry that wouldn’t leave until 70 freight vehicles had arrived and boarded. There are no queues on the french side.

@everythingthelighttouches

Here is a map to show where all the mutations are.

This is interesting thanks.

Random question!

I've read increasing numbers if reports saying children are more likely to catch new strain.

Is this likely how and why it mutated? It's been since September when all the mixing of children in schools occurred. Can and do viruses mutate in response to environment? So could it have adapted to be effective spreading in this ready made mass breeding ground?