Hear me out...a few thoughts about the "more infectious strain"

[Whatever9999]

So a virus is gonna do what a virus is gonna do, its whole raison d'etre is to spread to the next person.

Is it possible that we have actually caused this mutation to dominate by social distancing, wearing masks, etc?

After all if the virus was struggling to spread and multiply with the distancing then as with all evolution, a more transmissible strain would have an evolutionary advantage and so is going to be more successful in being passed on. Its literally how evolution works and the life cycle of a virus is so much shorter than most animals/plants which means it can evolve in a much quicker timescale.

*note I am not saying that we should stop social distancing, I'm simply saying that is it not possible that the virus has simply done what every living organism eventually does (or doesn't and dies out) which is adapt to its surroundings

Does a virus ever peter out, as was supposed to have happened with the spanish flu virus?

It was nothing that we did.
mutations are random
viruses replicate rapidly, and every time they do there may or may not be random changes in their genetic material
most changes have no effect at all
if it confers an advantage then it will go on to be more effective and be able to replicate more - just like natural selection.

the virus has been changing since it first came out of Wuhan - thats how, early last year, they were able to identify which variants were going where - for example, most of the UK was being infected by the mutated variant that was dominant in Italy, whereas the 'wuhan' original strain was the one moving across the USA. Most of the early variants were much of a muchness.

this new variant is just lucky in that it allowed it to be more transmissible. Whether it actually mutated in Kent, or mutated the other side of the channel and travelled here, we wont probably know for a while, but it has a distinct advantage.

But no. We didnt do it to ourselves. Its just how this stuff works

@lightand

Does a virus ever peter out, as was supposed to have happened with the spanish flu virus?

yes, if it has nowhere left to go, eventually it will peter out. That happens when either people have been vaccinated, or have natural immunity

it needs a new host in order to replicate. If it cant find one it will die. It doesnt last too long outside the body.

@TorringtonDean

Wasn’t it opening the schools and allowing it to spread again which caused the mutation? Plus all the flouters?

I had read similar on Twitter. That lockdown but keeping schools open may have led it to mutate fo become more transmissible, particularly among children, as the old variant didnt spread to them as easily and it had fewer adult hosts due to lockdown.

We've been told in the past that the virus has affected children less. I wonder if it's being trying to mutate to overcome this, bearing in mind there's more of a concern now over children catching/spreading it.

@lightand

Does a virus ever peter out, as was supposed to have happened with the spanish flu virus?

Yes, because it mutates. Spanish flu didn't just 'disappear' it got less severe as it mutated and evolved into a 'normal' variation of flu which the population was much less affected by.

We know that covid will be around forever now just because of how many cases there are, just circulating and mutating. It should decrease in severity as it mutates and we should increase our immunity either through vaccinations or natural immunity.

Like flu we may have to adapt vaccinations as different covid strains become more common and the vaccines become less effective. This may or may not be a problem depending on when this happens. We are used to changing the flu vaccine. But the South African strain is a worry as the fear is that this will spread before we have the scientific capacity/logistic ability to change the vaccine programme/underlying natural immunity to deal with this change.

My understanding is that COVID is fairly stable - more than flu - and has mutated less. But the recent batch of multiple mutations has bothered scientists because more mutations happens than they expected and all at the same time (this was a new trend).

Its very much a race against time to get on top of the problem. Large numbers of cases are an issue not just because of deaths and hospitalisation rate and hampering vaccine roll out but because more case = more chances of mutations.

@Lottie4

We've been told in the past that the virus has affected children less. I wonder if it's being trying to mutate to overcome this, bearing in mind there's more of a concern now over children catching/spreading it.

Evolution is the product of random mutations. Random mutations in genetic sequence occur at a predictable rate.

Some of these random mutations will cause the organism they arise in to die or be less functional (e.g. a mutation causing someone to be born without a limb), but some will give rise to an evolutionary advantage, and will therefore become more prevalent as the offspring of those organisms will be more successful at surviving and reproducing.

No organism or virus "tries" to evolve in a certain way, that's just ridiculous.

@Lottie4

We've been told in the past that the virus has affected children less. I wonder if it's being trying to mutate to overcome this, bearing in mind there's more of a concern now over children catching/spreading it.

Children have less ACE2 receptors. They increase in numbers during puberty (hence why younger children less affected).

If as suggested the new strain attaches more easily to ACE2 receptors, then you need less virus to get infected but it also might mean that children exposed to a higher level of viral load who previously weren't getting infected (because there's less cells to get infected) are now getting infected because the virus is more efficient.

It won't be 'trying to evolve to overcome' anything. If something is more efficiently spread it will simply become dominant as infects more people and has greater exponential growth. For example instead of 10 people infecting 13 people, 10 people infect 17 people and so on. If this strain is more effective and can effect children more than it will be particularly problematic because of how schools are indoors, poorly ventilated and have large numbers of people in - the very worst combination and highest risk. However its not just being more effectively spread amongst children - its also doing the same thing for adults. Hence the huge increase in cases in areas where the new strain has become common.

@Longtalljosie Manzanilla wasn’t ‘wrong on every point’ at all.

Viruses exist as a mix of variants. There is an inherent mutation rate that occurs upon replication. There are thousands of variants in circulation. The one that seems to be becoming more prevalent quite rapidly has 17 mutations, one is in the external spike protein which is key to virus/host cell attachment and entry. Some variants are more successful and so become more prevalent in the population (I think this one also has a deletion in ORF8 which is thought to affect replication).

The key thing is that transmission, for whatever reason, is ramping up with this variant, over others. It is not a new strain. In virological terms, a new strain would have to be phenotypically distinct. It is given a ’name’, or referenced by the mutation of most significance, so folks know which variant they’re referring to.

The media very much do misrepresent things and stretch small facts. This variant is an issue wrt numbers of people requiring hospitalisation.

The Oxford group (Jenner Institute/John Bell) that designed their vaccine are checking that the spike protein mutation doesn’t change antibody response to that region, so making the vaccine less effective - but the amino acid change does not change the region sufficiently to think that will be the case at all. They will also check the ‘South African’ variant, which has a more problematic mutation within the spike protein - and any other variants that become more prevalent that may affect the antigenic regions of the current vaccines.

Do viruses peter out? Well it looks like SARS and MERS did. Which is why there's hope that we can get on top of this one. According to the brilliant Dr John Campbell. His Youtube channel is well worth a listen.

I wish I could find a link for this, but a professor from the UEA was on the news last night, and he said that viruses always want to survive, and it could be that because schools were open, it adapted to become more transmissible from children, because they were a more readily available part of society where it could do this.
I will try and find a transcript.

@Longtalljosie I think your quoted PPs point is that there is a difference between a "new strain" (what it is often quoted to be) and a new variant (what you both agree that it is)

It's akin to a new strain being a sibling, versus a new variant being the same person in a different hat 😂

From a virologist:

"Viruses don’t evolve to get around masks, distancing, or disruption of the virus particle by detergents or disinfectants. Mutation doesn’t defy the laws of physics."
mobile.twitter.com/angie_rasmussen/status/1345448977601241088

@squishee
Someone told me that SARS and MERS are "contained".
Which may not be the same as peter out?

I saw an interview with an immunologist yesterday on tv where their only worry, at this stage, is with regard to the new South African variant, but he believed that the current vaccine could be tweaked to protect against this variant, and that would take approximately six weeks in the lab, then I imagine further time to pass it through the relevant and important safety trials and MRHA approval, but at this stage, that’s just conjecture, until the SA variant is studied further in the lab, no one really knows for sure. Hopefully we’ll have prevented the SA variant from spreading too far and have caught it early enough.

Excellent thread by the way, virology was my favourite topic at uni, viruses amazing little cell hijackers, making your own cells’ machinery work to churn out more of them!

@squishee

Do viruses peter out? Well it looks like SARS and MERS did. Which is why there's hope that we can get on top of this one. According to the brilliant Dr John Campbell. His Youtube channel is well worth a listen.

Theyre both coronavirus is but they also behave somewhat differently to covid... I'm not sure if trying to extrapolate is helpful🤔

..."disruption of the virus particle by detergents or disinfectants"...

Am I missing something here? The rest are fine, but enveloped viruses and their lack of ability to withstand disinfectant isn't a law of physics...?

Yoho maybe. Not my extrapolation though. Feel free to tell Dr Campbell if you think you know better than him.

@squishee Dr Campbell is not a virologist

The new strain coincided with schools going back but also with the return of all those who swanned off on their jollies and brought back foreign mutations that we had zero immunity to perhaps?

I think that although viruses mutate regardless, what we humans do inevitably will have an effect on the outcome of how successful (or not) those mutations are. Anywhere we let our guard down, so to speak, gives the virus an opportunity to infect.

So imagine, several mutations occur, and there we all are (mainly) using masks and SD, but one mutation enables the virus to stick on more tightly when it does make human contact, contact with someone who is not wearing a mask, is careless with their hygiene or SD. It really is a sticky little bugger.

A few careless people are infected with this and transmit more of these 'stickier' viruses in environments where the hosts are being less careful (i.e. very often home settings or anywhere we don't use SD or masks). The other variants that are less sticky are less successful finding a new host, and so the new sticky variant starts to become the dominant variant over time. This is basically what's happened with the new variant 'discovered' in Kent. Even if people take the same precautions that worked reasonably well with the older 'less sticky' variants, this new variant has an advantage. The only way to slow it down is to limit contacts with others in an even more draconian way.

We have to hope and pray that there are no mutations that cause the virus to become more severe, but even more transmissible with the same level of severity can be enough to crash the NHS and cause chaos, simply because of the numbers of people infected.

That's how I see it, anyway.

@FixTheBone

Partly, yes.

But it's ability to mutate and evolve is also based on the number of replication cycles, which in turn is related to the number of people infected.

So it's probably come about because we isolated and distanced, but ineffectively. Think of it like taking half a course of antibiotics, except this is half-arsed political maneuvering.

Exactly this. We allowed it to successfully transmit in the first place allowing the mutation to survive. Mutations happen during cell division all the time.

I can highly recommend 'This week in Virology' or TWiV Google it. From an expert in Virology', going back 30+ yes - Vincent Racaniello, and team

@midnightstar66
New Zealand[25 deaths to covid, which even relating to a population the size of the uk would mean approx 2600, not 80,000 deaths] makes people quarantine when they fly in there, for two weeks.
At some point, if the UK and other countries are properly serious about stopping the virus[though I doubt the virus will ever properly stop] will need to do too.

The UK Gvmnt missed the opportunity - sorry, opportunities - to make any sort of meaningful difference. It's been catch up and damage limitation/crisis management throughout