Is the original variant from Wuhan still about?

[FlatteredFool]

I've just been reading about the current variants of concern and how the Kent variant has been renamed Alpha, and the Indian variant Delta. There's the SA and Brazilian ones too of course but what happened to the original from Wuhan? Has it gone? Mutated? Of no significance now? I've not been following things except vaguely so I've no doubt missed this information. Can anyone explain please? Thank you.

@NicknamesAreLikeKleenex

I’m unconvinced by the reasoning that social distancing causes more evolutionary pressure to become more transmissible.

If you abolished all social distancing and let people go about their normal lives then the disease would spread faster. New variants with improved transmissibility would still arise, probably faster because there would be more chances of mutation, and they would still have a significant competitive advantage over the original strain and rapidly achieve dominance. Even in 2019, you’d still have twenty brief arms length contacts for every one close contact, just due to geometry, so any virus which can better infect those more distant contacts would always have an advantage.

I agree. I'm saying if there is only partial social distancing. Same with the vaccines. You need to hit a threshold to be effective. Below the threshold you are merely adding some selection pressure which can be evaded.

@SonnetForSpring

Yes the UK variant is well known in other countries. It has caused them massive problems.

Yes the UK variant (that we exported around the world) became the dominant strain in most places.

India's problems initially started, not with their Delta strain but with our UK Alpha variant.

Definitely not suggesting that the alternative is no restrictions. That would be worse. More replication = more chances to develop a mutation that gives the virus an advantage.

It's more that twice in the last 6 months we've been controlling an outbreak with restrictions and then a new strain has come along that isn't controlled by those restrictions and we've just sat and watched it grow because while cases of that strain are rising overall cases are falling. We've given those strains a bit of a helping hand against the existing variant.

@RafaIsTheKingOfClay

Definitely not suggesting that the alternative is no restrictions. That would be worse. More replication = more chances to develop a mutation that gives the virus an advantage.

It's more that twice in the last 6 months we've been controlling an outbreak with restrictions and then a new strain has come along that isn't controlled by those restrictions and we've just sat and watched it grow because while cases of that strain are rising overall cases are falling. We've given those strains a bit of a helping hand against the existing variant.

I'm not sure I agree that the new strains wouldn't be controlled by the existing restrictions, just the we seem to keep lifting restrictions then getting a new variant and not clamping down again quickly enough.

We should be getting a circuit breaker with school holidays coming up, but we won't eith all the people planning holidays because of the stupid Amber situation.

@RafaIsTheKingOfClay

No, it’s not.

The original strain didn’t spread much further than Wuhan. It was out competed by a variant and died out. That variant affected mostly Asian countries, possibly was in S. America too but didn’t really take off in Europe. I think there were isolated cases but it didn’t really spread in the way it did in Asia.

It was another variant that caused things to take off in Europe in Jan/Feb 2020. D456G, IIRC, but might be wrong about that.

Ah that makes a lot of sense (even it you maybe got the name wrong) and explains why Covid was found in water samples in Italy in something like September 2019... and can account for why it in the U.K. for a while before it started to take hold in the beginning of 2020.

Is Covid still an issue in Wuhan? Or has it effectively died out there?

The Italian variant hit Europe & North America. Think the Spanish Flu 1918 lasted 2 - 3 years & started in Idaho 😭 Lots of academic folks are gonna be writing about this pandemic in years to come 🤪🤣🙃

theconversation.com/was-coronavirus-really-in-europe-in-march-2019-141582 Madrid, March 12, 2019, sewage faecal samples.

graphics.reuters.com/HEALTH-CORONAVIRUS/EVOLUTION/yxmpjqkdzvr/

This is from 2020 (so before current variants ) but it suggests that the original Wuhan strain has been outcompeted by other strains