India double mutation and red list

[Clotsaway]

This is worrying. They have all the variants present and a new double mutation of covid.

When will they be red listed? Sure as hell don't want the double mutation coming into the country. What's taking the government so long to ted list them?!?!

Strikes me as sticking fingers in the dyke & nature, if it really really wants to, will always find a way.

Ok, we have medical advances, but that is counterbalanced with us being globalists these days & also with the sheer amount of us, especially in densely populated countries, spread/evolution of viruses is made easier as well as us simultaneously trying to make it harder?

Could we just be prolonging the agony?

RedcurrantPuff. It's all bullshit but finally more people are starting to see they are being played. We'll some are anyway.

@RedcurrantPuff

Read online this morning “the new variant was known about in February but its significance wasn’t understood until now”

Oh of COURSE it wasn’t! Just conveniently now it is,as lockdown is ending. Same as the “Kent variant” that had been around since September only became a problem before the ridiculous Christmas plans were due to come into force.

I’m sure it’s not at all that the new variants are being overplayed to try and backtrack on government decision making.

Yes but look what happened in January as a result of the Kent variant! Or did we all imagine the fact that 1/3 of deaths occurred as the variant took hold?

I assume that new variants are detected all the time - I dont find it at all surprising that their significance isn't immediately clear.

So those of you who don’t think India should be on the red list, would you open borders to Brazil? Because the state of affairs in several large cities on the ground in India currently is terrible. In fact, I know quite a few people there who think it is very surprising that UK have not put India on the red list yet.
The economy adapts and jobs change if you have a stable society with health and education. There will be more tech jobs, tutor jobs, warehouse/delivery jobs - less retail/hospitality/leisure travel jobs etc. We are living through a structural change. Whether or not new variants take hold here there will have to be lots of flu vaccines and updated Covid vaccines next autumn to protect the NHS and our elderly population. They have to catch up on waiting lists.

Living with Covid actually means always staying on step ahead of the virus and having various tools to combat it. If we want to avoid future lockdowns, this government needs to react quickly to new variants. In this case, it is not, yet again.

Slightly more balanced take on the variants here: www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/india-england-brazil-downing-street-asian-b930189.html

Living with Covid actually means always staying on step ahead of the virus and having various tools to combat it. If we want to avoid future lockdowns, this government needs to react quickly to new variants. In this case, it is not, yet again.

Completely agree with this. Clearly we are going to need to learn to live with Covid as it's not going to be eradicated any time soon. But it's infuriating when people try to argue that removing all restrictions would be "learning to live with Covid". Letting Covid get out of control to the point that ever more dangerous mutations keep emerging is the exact opposite of "learning to live with Covid ".

The whole Covid secure bollocks really annoys me.

No, your business is not "Covid secure" if you have a half height plastic screen between you and the customer. Nor does said plastic screen stop you having to either wear a mask and/or socially distance from your colleague.

@flowerycurtain

The whole Covid secure bollocks really annoys me.

No, your business is not "Covid secure" if you have a half height plastic screen between you and the customer. Nor does said plastic screen stop you having to either wear a mask and/or socially distance from your colleague.

This! Thank you. They even do this at my bloody doctor’s surgery. The doors and windows of the reception area are sealed shut, you have to stand inside and queue and the receptionists sit behind a plexiglass screen with no masks. I think it’s fucking appalling in a healthcare setting that staff aren’t wearing masks.

I think the predictions of Dr Geert Vanden Bosch are increasingly holding merit. He’s as pro vaccine as you can get and has actively helped developed vaccines, but his belief is that these vaccines are the wrong type for a pandemic on this scale (I’m just quoting what he’s said from my own understanding, it’s worth looking yourself). He agrees they work in suppressing symptoms and are safe to the individual who gets the vaccine, but believes that the fact it doesn’t completely shut down the transmission chain alongside the delay between a first and second vaccine (I think it’s been explained as similar to not taking the full course of antibiotics, the bacteria becomes resistant) is going to essentially support the worst variants into becoming the dominant variants and allow further mutations.

@Clotsaway

If this is the case then why are they not red listed yet? Why is our government taking so long to take action?

Because they are incompetent and over-confident, as they have been from the start.

The traffic light system is bullshit (we need proper quarantine for all countries really) but as we have it India clearly belongs on the red list - cases are twice as high as Pakistan and Bangladesh both of which are on the red list.

The bottom line is Johnson doesn't care to prevent more covid chaos.

To add to my previous comment, he also mentioned something about vaccines in younger people potentially making their immune response too specific towards the variants that were around when the vaccine was developed. When they contract a new variant they will remain asymptomatic but will basically be a vector for this mutation to mutate even further and they’ll then shed that form of the virus. The delay between first and second vaccine greatly worsens this effect.

It’s just one man’s opinion but it’s interesting to think about and I believe it makes logical sense. If what he says has any truth to it I think it will be seen relatively soon with the Indian variant, which I think has already been given more than enough chance to take hold thanks to this incompetent government.

yet we are allowing 50 flights in from India

Under what pretext are people able to still be flying in and out of any country not just India?? What happened to fines in the thousands for people flying without explicit reasons?

Boris is the worst possible man to have in charge at a time like this. He's not really that interested in the job, is bored by detail and likes big gestures that he thinks people will like (see 'saving Christmas' and opening the pub's). Tragically it seems to work on a large proportion of the population who think he's a wag.

Whenever I find myself falling into the madness of a MN Coronavirus thread I am reminded of the Redditt Coronavairus UK brilliantly moderated with a host of intelligent, reasoned debate and information. I commend it to the house. Hysteria and misinformation get downvoted there so drops off the radar allow the truth to bubble up to the top.

www.reddit.com/r/CoronavirusUK/

@RedcurrantPuff

As I said on another thread the whole thing makes me just take the new variant shite with a pinch of salt. If the government were concerned they’d actually do something.

How did that work last February into March?

@savethegrannies

We need a referendum on this. It’s too big now and it is as plain as day variants will be the new stick to beat us all with and force more lockdowns (funny nobody mentioned variants when vaccines were sold as our way out of this). Anyway, Vote A. Let’s hide away for the next few years and create a nation of divided, largely depressed people and young folk who don’t know what it’s like to be young; or Vote B. Let’s all take our chances. If people die, they die. If people get seriously ill, well shit happens. Just ask those who have lost loved ones to suicide or delayed cancer prognosis this past year. I am personally classed as CV. I really don’t care. Life is too fleeting and precious to put another couple of years on hold.

That's all well and good, but it was never about saving lives. It's about hospital capacity.

Society can't function if there's no available hospital beds to treat people with anything but this one virus.

@namechangeaga1ne

Of course India should be on the red list. Boris wants to go to New Delhi. It would therefore be inconvenient to put India on the red list. Boris is the equivalent of the "don't ask permission, apologise (or in his case, deflect/stonewall later" brigade.

Ooh, I know someone like this. Couldnt believe my ears when the person said it to a small group of us behind closed doors once. And has repeated it since too.

Of course, what Boris is going to do could be looked at another way too... I dont think I could ever totally trust him.

@BonnieDundee

You can't live with this virus.

We will have to. The genie is well and truly out of the bottle. There's no putting it back in.

Quite. People and even world leaders who want zero covid - how could that possibly work when viruses constantly mutate?

@Clotsaway

This is worrying. They have all the variants present and a new double mutation of covid.

When will they be red listed? Sure as hell don't want the double mutation coming into the country. What's taking the government so long to ted list them?!?!

In addition to stopping travel from India (why do people still think it is sensible to travel all over the place?) wouldn't it be a good idea if instead of endlessly testing ourselves when rates are low, we shipped all the lateral flow test kits to India, Brazil and so on, so that they could better reduce their covid numbers. Large numbers of cases anywhere means more mutations, means more risk for us all. When will the petty nationalism stop and people start taking a global view?

@savethegrannies We need a referendum on this

I was thinking only last week, referendums seem so 5 years ago, and oh so quaint. Fancy asking the people what they would like to happen?!

@beguilingeyes

Boris is the worst possible man to have in charge at a time like this. He's not really that interested in the job, is bored by detail and likes big gestures that he thinks people will like (see 'saving Christmas' and opening the pub's). Tragically it seems to work on a large proportion of the population who think he's a wag.

And similarly we will have holidays abroad in the summer as is our right and need, even though it is a bonkers idea.

@User135644
If hospital capacity isnt much ramped up by Sept, I for one am going to be very annoyed. The government cant keep using the same reason/excuse, year in and year out. Sorry, it wont wash with me.

Hospital capacity seemed to be perpetually “at breaking point” all winter. It never broke did it? It never does. Perhaps NHS managers need to get on with their jobs instead of their constant moaning.

You can't train new ICU nurses and doctors by September. 🙄 Staffing has been the main problem. You can make space as we saw with the Nightingales but not staff them. The one positive this year should at least be vaccination for frontline staff and good quality PPE, hopefully leading to less staff sickness and absence.

@savethegrannies

Hospital capacity seemed to be perpetually “at breaking point” all winter. It never broke did it? It never does. Perhaps NHS managers need to get on with their jobs instead of their constant moaning.

No because we were locked down all winter and restrictions stopped normal seasonal flu from spreading. Despite all that the hospitals were in a bad way in January especially with ambulances parked around the block with sick patients or driven to different counties where they had beds.