'New Variant' of Coronavirus Identified in UK, Health Secretary Says (sky.com) 74
A "new variant" of coronavirus has been identified in the UK, which is believed to be causing the faster spread in the South East, Health Secretary Matt Hancock has said. From a report: More than 1,000 cases of the new variant have been found, "predominantly in the south of England", Mr Hancock told the House of Commons this afternoon. It is spreading faster than the existing strain of coronavirus and believed to be fuelling the "very sharp, exponential rises" in cases across the South East, he said. So far it has been found in 60 local authority areas and is thought to be similar to the mutation discovered in other countries in recent months. It was first identified in Kent last week during routine surveillance by Public Health England (PHE), with ministers told about it on Friday. The health secretary said that there is currently no evidence that the new variant will not respond to the COVID-19 vaccines being rolled out across the country.
"no evidence" (Score:2, Interesting)
"there is currently no evidence that the new variant will not respond to the COVID-19 vaccines being rolled out "
But is there any evidence that it wont?
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A more virulent, but less deadly strain might actually be a good thing.
It might impart immunity without killing.
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I wonder, is it possible to give someone the MRNA vaccine which as I understand it, has enough of the virus spike protein there to generate a body's immune response.
Could the people that have been given the vaccine, then have their blood serum pulled and given to other people that have not had the vaccine yet, to impart immunity to them?
I know they were doing this with people that ha
Re: "no evidence" (Score:1)
The mRNA vaccine doesnâ(TM)t have any spike.
It is mRNA code which penetrates your bodyâ(TM)s cells, and hijacks their machinery to produce the coronavirus spike protein.
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Interesting idea, but to inoculate you need the viral proteins plus an adjuvant (or at least viral RNA if you're fancy). Plasma of vaccine recipients, while containing antibodies, will contain waay too little of that. Also, it will cost a lot more in resources to do the extraction from volunteers etc. than to just produce more vaccine.
Re: "no evidence" (Score:2)
Deadly? (Score:3)
I wish when they had these new COVID strain stories, they'd report if the strain seems to be more/less deadly...that's the main thing I'm concerned about.
A more virulent, but less deadly strain might actually be a good thing.
It might impart immunity without killing.
I am mostly concerned about surviving and being stuck with the co-pays and out of pocket expenses.
I die and my healthcare providers can all peck at my feeble estate after my student loan providers take everything.
Everyone else is shit-out-of-luck. I'm dead.
Now, a better healthcare system that every other Western country has and adopted would greatly mitigate the problems that we the USA are having.
We are also paying the price for "Freedom of Speech". While Alex jones, our President and other lying cunts
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If you're young enough to have fresh student loans, then likely as not, you will not have any complications from the disease if you show any signs at all.
If you are out of work, etc...there are safety nets, apply for and get on medicaid.
The immunizations will be free of charge, but if you get
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But seriously...what did Mitch do that hurt you directly and so badly you are complaining about it?
Is this a serious question? If so then there is nothing anyone can tell you that will make you understand what that traitor to the American People has done.
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I'm serious.
With the exception of the pandemic, I liked pretty much everything they did over the past 4 years.
Economy was solid, I like trying to push back the Chinese.
I like the attempt to solidify our borders.
Unemployment was at all time lows.
For the most part YES, I liked what they did the US was going in a good direction.
I'm really afraid Joe
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Less deadly but more virulent could also be worse. It could cause more long-term disabilities, or it could overload hospitals more quickly leading to indirect deaths.
Re: "no evidence" (Score:2)
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The sentence you quoted answers your question.
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I totally agree. No one wants to hear about a new variant of ketchup!
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Yup! Happens all the time.
I also "accidentally" hit that post anonymously button constantly too.
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"there is currently no evidence that the new variant will not respond to the COVID-19 vaccines being rolled out "
But is there any evidence that it wont?
Obviously not. This announcement is a typical politico "zero meaning statement" that gives the impression to the casual listener that things are fine.
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The only reason it wouldn't is if the spike protein mutates so the immune system can't recognize it. If that happens, then the virus will most likely spread more slowly, not faster.
Re: "no evidence" (Score:1)
Herd immunity? (Score:4, Insightful)
So we won't get herd immunity if we just wait around for everyone to cough on each other? Guess we do need to wear masks and have a vaccine instead of just waiting around for the problem to go away on its own. (is anyone also waiting for spontaneous herd immunity from herpes?)
"Currently No Evidence" (Score:1)
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
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So? The corollary would still be applicable.
Anyway, in this case there is little reason to think the vaccine won't remain to be effective, because we can check whether the vaccine targets in the virus genome have changed. If there are no changes in those parts it highly likely the vaccine will still be effective. A robber can still be identified if he changes his shirt, as long as his face isn't changed. Of course virus/vaccine interplay is a little more complex, but that's the closest way to explain it.
Re: "Currently No Evidence" (Score:2)
Vaccine should still work (Score:5, Informative)
Couple of things:
1. I think I looked at the genome for the new strain that I believe he's referring to .. seems the mutations are mainly confined to orf1a and orf1b, the vaccine targeting regions are OK ..so the vaccines will still work. Of course, that's assuming I am looking at the same strain he's talking about .. from south east England .. unless there's a different one with a genome that hasn't been disseminated -- which would be odd these days.
2. Also, it really doesn't look like a new strain at all. Point mutations don't count .. literally every copy of an RNA virus has mutations .. you can't call every point mutation a new strain. You have to see it spreading and acting differently.
Again I could be looking at the wrong data since this fool didn't bother to provide more details other than "South East England." I suppose I could ask around if there was a point to it.
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It's also why the mink mutations were handled rather swiftly - the virus had jumped the species barrier twice - from humans to mink, and back again (I believe they found 12 different variations, 1 of which crossed back from mink back to humans).
Even worse, other places are seeing human to mink virus jumping - Canada has seen mink die from COVID-19 when exposed workers infected the mink. Only in Canada it was a sole isolated mink farm (it's not a big industry as it is in Europe).
No back jumping. (Score:3)
the virus had jumped the species barrier twice - from humans to mink, and back again
It's not "jumping back to human". It's your usual SARS-CoV-2 virus variant that can still spread between human as easily (we see it propagating accross the NextStrain tree, and my team have sequenced copies of this variant in Switzerland).
Except that apparently, the tweaks introduced in the variant enables it a bit better to *also infect* mink.
It never stopped infecting human, it just got slightly less bad at infecting mink.
Re: No back jumping. (Score:2)
Mutations? Be afraid. Be very afraid. (Score:4, Interesting)
And this is why it's not a good idea to play games with herd-immunity. The more people who get infected, the more opportunities for mutations that make the situation worse.
So far there only seems to be one major lesson from Covid-19: The international community is no longer capable of containing pandemics. We used to be able to do this sort of thing, but not now. Few people remember much about SARS or MERS or even Ebola, but no one is going to forget Covid-19.
But as I've already noted a couple of times, Covid-19 (AKA SARS-CoV-2) appears to have been a relatively minor zoonotic accident. The next accident might be much worse. Or it might not be an accident.
In penultimate-closing, I want to point at an especially egregious example of a gawdawful response to Covid-19 by the government of Japan. (But America's responses (anti-led by "He whose name need not be mentioned") have been worse.) To ameliorate the economic damages of Covid-19 the government went out of its way with so-called GoTo campaigns to encourage travel and dining out. These are activities that increase the spread of the disease, but the government didn't want to lose face by admitting that they were bad ideas, so they waffled around until the situation got much worse. Yesterday they finally noticed and stopped the GoTo idiocy.
In closing, I'll repeat my favorite solution approach for the economic part of it. If you don't like it, then let's hear your better idea. My thought is to pay for ACTUAL damages, which can be estimated pretty well for any business that has been around for a couple of years. Even for a business that opened just before Covid-19 struck the economy, the damages can be estimated fairly accurately based on competing businesses. If a business had a profit of $2,000 in June 2019 but a loss of $10,000 in June 2020, then the Covid-19 damage can be estimated at $12,000. Now if only the business (and all competing businesses) had purchased pandemic insurance to cover that loss, then things would be relatively rosy. But of course that didn't happen and we can't expect to insure against everything. So I suggest the government be more explicit when it is acting as the insurer of last resort. (Other obvious examples were in 2008 worldwide and in 2011 in Japan.) So why not let the businesses file claims for their damages? Insurance usually doesn't cover 100%, so the coverage and deductibles still exist as the incentives to find ways to maximize business even in The New Normal of Covid-19. The trick here is that the government can play games with money in future time, but rather than borrowing the money for fire hoses, the government would be borrowing the money and paying it back as insurance premiums (paid in the future instead of the past). The claims could be handled by a government agency, but right now I don't see any reason not to use the existing insurance companies for that part of it. They are supposed to be profitable experts based on assessing and paying claims quickly (which includes detecting bogus claims). (By the way, one of the Japanese government's responses to Covid-19 did involve paying businesses, but with poor checking of the claims, predictably resulting in the yakuza quickly creating a scam involving the creation of fake businesses by patsies.)
In post script I realize that I've been drawn away from the main topic again... However most of the medical damage of Covid-19 has been precisely because too much attention has been paid to secondary economic effects (or even worse, to the political opportunities created by the crisis). If a new mutation results in a new coronavirus that is not handled by the new Covid-19 vaccines, then all of us will be back at square one. The economic stuff is strictly secondary.
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Well, it "worked" in the sense that it killed millions of people and decimated the population. Following that it still remained/remains a threat emerging in outbreaks. Even for Europeans, it wasn't like they were totally immune .. they had less casualties but it would still cause deaths even among Europeans. Infectious diseases were consistently the leading causes of death right up until the 1940s. Do you want to go that route?
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Y'all are feeding a troll. Anyone defending herd immunity as a solution-approach to Covid-19 is sincerely stupid, profoundly ignorant, both, or paid to fake it. And I don't care which.
My concern is with the threat of making things worse. The more times you roll the dice, the more chances you have to lose. Evolution likes losers. Death is what makes evolution work. Much as I like evolution, I ain't so crazy about the death part. I tend to take it personally. Maybe you, too?
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No, death doesn't make evolution work. Death is not a requirement for evolution. Increased reproduction is more of a factor than death. And besides we will have gene editing available soon .. so any bad mutations can simply be edited out. This gives a the species a tremendous advantage. Previously if an Einstein was born with poor athletic abilities ... the genes for his superior intelligence would have been lost because he was poor in hunting or something like that. The more survivors we have, the richer a
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No. Try any amount of compound growth over geologic time. The numbers don't work.
You may be terrified of death or whatever, but it's sadly necessary.
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Well, differential reproduction makes evolution work. Death certainly plays a role in that, in that if any organism dies before it reproduces, or death means it doesn't reproduce as often as another organism in the same population, then the other organism is more likely to have its genes stay in the gene pool. Evolution really doesn't work on individuals in any population; evolution happens to entire populations. In some populations, like most unicellular organisms that reproduce by binary fission, other th
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Again basically concurrence. However I think we may be reaching a transition point, where natural and blind evolution will be largely displayed by deliberate and designed evolution of machine intelligence. My favorite resolution of the Fermi Paradox involves curious AIs gambling quatloos on whether we replace or exterminate ourselves.
However mostly I'm lamenting my slow wit. I just realized I missed yet another chance to get rich. Ultimate gag gift of this Christmas season, but now it's too late. Special or
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If a business had a profit of $2,000 in June 2019 but a loss of $10,000 in June 2020, then the Covid-19 damage can be estimated at $12,000.
One the things with insurance is you usually have to identify before hand *what* you are insuring. Even with things like business continuity insurance etc, you usually have to get pretty specific about what assets and what revenues.
For a lot business its going to be pretty strait forward as you say. However for a large enough potion of other adjudicating the claims will be impossible and so time consuming nobody will ever get thru the process. What about that restaurant that was just about to open their exp
Sidetracked by the economics (again) (Score:2)
I'm certainly not denying that there are lots of details to quibble over, but quibbling over the details is not really a constructive solution approach. I could respond by quibbling over your quibbles?
However there is a general response based on the general approach. Think of the government as the customer of the post-facto pandemic insurance. It isn't a normal sales situation because the government is basically being forced to cover the damages (to keep the economy going so there will be future profits to
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The problem in the UK is that trust in the government is at an all time low, and the messages are unclear, contradictory and confusing.
Christmas is going to be a nightmare, 3rd wave in January. Just waiting to see how they botched the vaccine roll out and what corruption to got up to.
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Sad concurrence. And condolences for your Boris-itis. Or would it be funnier as an inflamed Johnson?
Much as I want to be vaccinated, I'm actually glad that I'm not in a priority group. And as vaccines do become more available, I'm going to shop as carefully as I can before deciding which one to get. Actually coverage against mutations may be my primary shopping criterion. Please excuse me for not giving a FF which pharmaceutical company has the best stock price tomorrow.
I didn't mention it, but they include
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Mutations sufficient for the spike proteins vaccines are targeting to change significantly are possible, but not all that likely. Honestly, what would we worry me more is reports of mink in Denmark and Canada getting COVID-19 infections. Some of the really big changes in viral genomes, particularly with RNA viruses, happen when they hop to new species, because the likelihood of the COIVD-19 genome getting some new insertions from a more distantly related coronavirus and having that reintroduced into human p
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Basically concurrence, but let me emphasize that my main point is the more people who get sick, the more chances for mutations. Actually you've introduced another factor of more sick people creating more chances to transmit the disease to an animal that might transmit it back to people with mutations along that path.
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Now if only the business (and all competing businesses) had purchased pandemic insurance to cover that loss, then things would be relatively rosy.
The ability to insure against damages caused by a virus pretty much went away with sars in 2003 https://www.bloomberg.com/news... [bloomberg.com]
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Basically I concur, though I was throwing that approach in there along the lines of no-fault auto insurance coverage for drivers. We have a statistical basis for estimating the damages from car crashes, but pandemics are too unpredictable. No one can say how much pandemic insurance coverage would be appropriate, and that's why we're in the post-disaster situation. I would even say that a pandemic disaster was inevitable on the long term, but that it happened in 2020 is largely (or mostly) due to the special
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I think there's sort of a precedence in how the US handles flood insurance where at one point you couldn't get it for flood affected areas but the government stepped in and took some risk. I believe one of the ideas behind it was that private insurance companies are better at handling and estimating individual claims rather than large scale government programs. But I'm not really familiar with how this works so I don't know the details.
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Actually in my years with the commercial realtors I had some exposure to this, but now I can't remember many of the details. Mostly I remember a deal that fell through because the property was located within a 100-year-flood plain, so the buyers couldn't get the government-backed flood insurance they needed. I actually think that particular deal wasn't commercial, but a residential deal that the office manager was handling on the side.
However I don't think we can make such predictions for pandemics. Not eno
Don't rewrite history and gloat (Score:2)
The lockdown plan has been vindicated because we have a very good vaccine now, developed in record time. But even a month ago there was no assurance this would be the case. It seems from the vaccines that were preordered (mostly Oxford one and the traditional approaches) that the mRNA approach was considered a bit of a long shot six months ago.
Even your reference to SARS, MERS and Ebola are informative, in that it has taken decades to develop a vaccine for Ebola, and we still don't have one for MERS (though
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Fear of mutations? Or not? (Score:2)
I can't decide whether or not you're feeding a troll. On first reading it sounded like he was praising Xi of China, but on second reading it sounded like it wasn't worth a first reading. Going by the handle, I smell a sock puppet.
I do agree with you about the situation in New Zealand. However my larger concern these days is actually with unnatural mutations.
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So in Japan, GoTo is considered harmful.
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Dang, I wish I had thought of that first, but I don't have the mod point to give you.
Mod parent Funny.
Now I hope I get a chance to steal your joke. Gotta watch for a context.
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And this is why it's not a good idea to play games with herd-immunity. The more people who get infected, the more opportunities for mutations that make the situation worse.
^This
Many people don't realize how often mutations happen. Regular RNA viruses have a mutation rate of 1 out of every 1000 replications. This RNA virus is lower than that because it has some mutation 'spell checkers' but it's not nearly as low as DNA replication. Scientists had already catalogued 12,000 mutations [nature.com] back in September.
There are millions/billions/trillions of viral particles in each infected person, so each person is a vector for mutations. Most of these will be benign. The trend across
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Basic concurrence. But I'm thinking you are also evading the topic of unnatural mutations... I also don't want to talk or even think about it.
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Two things:
1) Where does the money come from to reimburse companies affected by shutdowns? Government handouts don't grow on trees, and we already have crippling national debt.
2) Even in Japan, no one was forced to go out. If you don't feel safe going somewhere for any reason, no one makes you. You can literally have everything you need delivered to your house. Adding years to one's life has value, no doubt. But if it comes at the cost of removing life from one's years, what kind of life is that?
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Where is the money coming from now? The governments are borrowing it. However they are mostly just spraying the money around with fire hoses. As I am reinterpreting the situation, the governments are acting as insurers of the last resort, but with almost no tracking of where the money is going,. Main exception is where they try to make sure that the biggest corporate cancers (AKA their campaign donors) are protected by getting lots of money. (And I don't actually blame the mindless corporate cancers for try
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I really don't understand the mindset of those online here who really do not seem to want to return to the world as it was less than a year ago. It's almost as if they are paid shills...
Other recent news (Score:5, Interesting)
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...they are being forced to go to school, where they are put in classes of 30 in a badly ventilated room, with teachers who rarely take a Covid-19 test ... perhaps it's not their fault ...
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...they are being forced to go to school, where they are put in classes of 30 in a badly ventilated room, with teachers who rarely take a Covid-19 test ... perhaps it's not their fault ...
Even worse, some teachers didn't even bother to wear mask in class, and then later tested positive.
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Winter is here. Schools are closing windows. No need to dig out some story about mutations to explain this. We're seeing this across the world as governments have steadfastly refused to close down schools again and now are no longer able to keep the ventilation requirements up either.
Matt Hancock... (Score:2)
Studied Economics, now Secretary of State for Health and Social Care after many other jobs in Government ... what he knows about Health you can write on the back of a postage stamp ...
N439K (Score:2)
There are several variants in the wild.
One hypothesis is that the D614G strain, which is the dominant one worldwide, and originated in Italy, is more infectious. China has an older strain and perhaps that is part of their success in containing it. The jury is still out on whether it is more infectious or not.
There is another strain in Spain. Again no definitive data if it is more infectious, virulent, both or neither.
And there is N439K [youtu.be]. This one is more virulent. Some preprint work confirms that. It origina
Vax won't protect you (Score:2)
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Last night on the CBS evening news they flat our said that the vaccine won't stop the spread of COVID-19, it won't make you immune, it will only reduce the severity of the symptoms.
There you have it - it's a JOKE!
Now if you say the news is lieing - then that also means they must be lieing about the COVID-19 anything.... So either they are telling the truth or lieing - you pick one.
Could be politics. If what they're saying really is true and it really is as terrible as they say then how come Joe hasn't called off the Inauguration? That would be a Super Spreader event. Even the restaurants are closed in the city. Maybe he knows there's going to be a riot, so it's ok? At one point he said we'd have to wear masks until the Inauguration. That's the magic day. When they get the guy trying to put the criminal politicians in jail out of office.
Then there's the school issue. We closed our sch
I wouldn't trust the UK Goverment (Score:2)
To be able to identify it's arse from it's elbow.
It's regularly openly lied and is highly reality challenged. So until another country sees this, it's probably not true. Probably some sort of excuse for the Prime Minister getting covid again, or something equally idiotic. At least the Secret Service has stopped Trump going down to covid wards and shaking hands (the PM did that mid March).