>>31558 >The statistics suggesting that patients carrying B.1.427/B.1.429 variants were more likely to die was based on the charts of 69 patients who were admitted to the hospital in the first place because they had very severe Covid-19.
>“If you only look at the sickest people you’re gonna see something different than if you look at the population as a whole,” said DeRisi, who was not involved in his colleagues’ study. Neither study tells us exactly why transmission rates are higher. The virus could be becoming more common by some fluke, or because it is slightly more transmissible.
>“I don’t think there’s any question that this lineage is becoming more common in California,” said William Hanage, an epidemiologist at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health. “But I think the amount of sampling in California is not sufficient to fully define why. And I think that we should be wary, before we categorize every locally emerging hopeful monster as a ‘variant of concern’.” He noted that although the California variant has now become more common in the state, researchers think it has most likely been around since at least May. “You’ve got to ask yourself why it’s been around for so long and hasn’t taken the world by storm,” he said.
>“I am not panicked, and you shouldn’t be either,” said Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease expert at UCSF. “It’s not unexpected that we’re seeing more variants,” she continued. “Viruses mutate, and often, these mutations will allow them to become more transmissible.” That’s the modus operandi of a pandemic-causing virus. And it’s scientists’ job to keep track of them, and test whether new variants can better evade our immune systems and vaccines.
>But for now, Gandhi said she was not particularly worried about B.1.427/B.1.429, or the variant that researchers this week flagged in New York. In both states daily deaths and hospitalizations are going down despite these new variants being in circulation, she noted. “So far, none of these variants have evolved to the point where they can completely get through masks, or they can overcome social distancing, or any of the other public health measures we’ve implemented.”
>“These emerging variants tell us we need to be vigilant, that maybe we shouldn’t be making summer vacation plans today,” said Waleed Javaid, an epidemiologist and the director of infection prevention and control at Mount Sinai hospital in New York. “But let’s wait and see before we worry too much.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/feb/25/california-coronavirus-variant-covid-vaccine
>Health officials are trying to trace one person in England who has been infected with a concerning variant of coronavirus first found in Brazil. They are one of six cases of the P1 variant found in the UK in February. The person is understood to have used a home testing kit but did not complete a registration form - prompting an appeal for anyone without a result from a test on 12 or 13 February to come forward.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-56234302
To be safe, the Met have already gunned down anyone using the underground.
I think the fact that you have to register and send in your home testing kit is putting a lot of people off, because it means automatic mandatory quarantine if it comes back positive.
I'm not sure if it's technically possible, but why can't they just do it like a home pregnancy test, and then on a don't ask, don't tell basis, but at the same time urging people to come forward and do another test at a facility if the home covid test is positive. You could in some way argue that a positive pregnancy test is much more life changing than a positive covid test.
>why can't they just do it like a home pregnancy test
I'm not aware of any covid test that simple that actually works, or even at all.
They all involve reagents that are potentially harmful, require refrigeration, and so on. The rapid tests they're getting in schools and airports and what have you come as self-contained kits where the chemicals are stored in little disposable capsules you load onto a machine, and even then it takes an at least semi-skilled person to pipette the right amount of buffer and viral medium into the sample container- when you're operating in microlitres you can't really just eyeball it. Also, the preparation really should be carried out under a negative airflow cabinet so the person doing the test isn't risking exposure.
If there was a test as simple as pissing on a bit of card and it actually gave accurate results, I doubt we'd still be going to all that trouble.
>>31564 The problem I see is if they find you have super-covid then they're going to want to detain you pretty sharpish if you're not compliant. It's not really that useful if they find you can singlehandedly undermine the British economy yet are unable to do anything about it.
Full pay to self-isolate, but breaching self-isolation results in a massive fine and possible prison time. If you are required to self-isolate, the location of your mobile phone will be tracked and you'll receive random visits to check that you're complying.
Crucially, their overall response was early and aggressive, so case numbers remained low enough for this resource-intensive regime to work.
>Full pay to self-isolate, but breaching self-isolation results in a massive fine and possible prison time
I thought it said something on the gov.uk covid web site about possible jail sentences for quarantine breaches in the UK, but apparently the worst that can happen to you is a £10,000 fine as a repeat offender.
I guess it's not the worst idea to not want to add to the inmate population in times of a pandemic, given that the virus certainly doesn't stop at prison gates.
>I thought it said something on the gov.uk covid web site about possible jail sentences for quarantine breaches
It doesn't really matter what the punishment is, because we aren't trying to catch offenders. This footage is from China, but it's illustrative of what a serious system of enforcement looks like in action. The comments are well worth a read.
A woman in Sainsburies counted me off on an electronic device as i exited her shop, unmasked, today. It sounded like a stopwatch. What're they doing; just reccording the number of un-masked people passing through or taking a timestamp to compare against the CCTV? I can think of no reason why they'd need a stopwatch otherwise.
City councils can impose a maximum number of customers per shop space. And even if they don't, shops have to calculate a reasonable number of customers that they can allow in at the same time so that distancing and other rules can be obeyed.
At the Lidl down the street here, I was told by a security guard the other day that I couldn't go in because there were too many customers in the shop at the moment, and he asked me to wait for a minute or two. He then apparently got an OK through his radio earpiece and let me in.
I think it's just an 'in and out' tally to see how many people are in at once, I don't think it'll be a timer. I shop maskless at a Sainsbury's and they've never ticked me off or anything, so it'll just be that I'd imagine.
I think masks should have been mandatory a long time ago. Many other European countries have imposed mask laws in public places and shops, like France, Spain, and Germany, and while it didn't mean they were able to dodge the Second Wave, I'm sure it did help in keeping the numbers from getting totally out of control.
>>31578 For whatever reason masks became a political issue in the eyes of some people. If you wear a muzzle then don't be surprised when they take away your other freedoms.
I am going to say the random maskless is something of a red herring. Because really our problems come from systemic issues of willful incompetence from higher ups. The question you should be asking when you hear things like "Brazilian strain in the UK" is why the fuck when apparently we can't even trust me sitting in a outdoor space with a friend, why is there any sort of air travel at all for any but the most exceptional of reasons (the only logical conclusion for why it is allowed to happen is that the air industry is being subsidised at the expense of humanity itself) and if that free exchange is allowed to happen does someone in your local Tescos not wearing a mask even matter.
>>31580 And that's just fucking hilarious honestly, I'm glad these people are willing to broadcast the fact they don't understand primary school science, I just wish they didn't make it everybody elses problem.
It's mainly the Alt-right who have been pushing the myth in the U.S. that being told to wear a mask is a violation of your constitutional rights, specifically freedom of speech and the right to liberty.
If you follow U.S. legal history, however, these rights aren't absolute. Nor are they (probably) in most other constitutional democracies with respect to the ongoing situation.
In a time of national crisis, government rule can very clearly and within reason supersede the U.S. Constitution, so that even if you may have a point that your Constitutional rights are temporarily infringed upon, there is a firm legal basis for the government to do so.
>All constitutional rights are subject to the government’s authority to protect the health, safety and welfare of the community. This authority is called the “police power.” The Supreme Court has long held that protecting public health is sufficient reason to institute measures that might otherwise violate the First Amendment or other provisions in the Bill of Rights.
I'm not sure I agree with this use of the term "police power", but there is therefore no real room for any kind of slippery-slope argument that your government is priming you to give up your constitutional rights one by one from here on out.
Unfortunately, this is evidently completely ungraspable to the average inbred, flag-waving knucklehead somewhere down in Dixie.
We're still on national lockdown. We fully expect cases to start climbing when we relax those restrictions, but we're hoping that hospital admissions and deaths will be kept down by the vaccine. If the P.1 variant gets a foothold then we're pretty much back to square one.
>We fully expect cases to start climbing when we relax those restrictions
It shouldn't be. The overwhelming majority of at risk from covid, are from those groups who already have been microchipped by Bill Gates. You can't treat it like it represents only a third of a random sample of population for these purposes of death or risk of hospitalisation it is closer to 90%+ cover.
>If the P.1 variant gets a foothold then we're pretty much back to square one.
Thing is, it's not limited to that one mutation. The virus has shown that it can mutate into much more severe forms completely at random without warning. Not even closing all borders will protect us against a deadly strain suddenly showing up endemically in Birmingham or Manchester.
>We fully expect cases to start climbing when we relax those restrictions, but we're hoping that hospital admissions and deaths will be kept down by the vaccine.
Cases will go up (because the people most likely to catch and spread the disease aren't vaccinated) but we're hoping that hospital admissions and deaths won't go up (because the people most likely to get seriously ill or die have been vaccinated).
Absolutely, but the P.1 variant is the most immediate risk because it's already in circulation. We're close to finding the missing case, but we may have left it too late to prevent community spread in the UK.
It's worth noting that P.1 wasn't identified until it spread to Japan, because Brazil has a pitifully poor testing and sequencing system; there may well be other variants of concern that haven't yet been identified. Any of those pricks in the queue at Heathrow could be carrying some yet-unknown strain that spreads via WhatsApp and makes you spunk out your kidneys.
>It's worth noting that P.1 wasn't identified until it spread to Japan, because Brazil has a pitifully poor testing and sequencing system; there may well be other variants of concern that haven't yet been identified.
On the other hand, it doesn't change the fundamental approach to containing a pandemic.
The 1919 Spanish Flu happened before the concept of a genome was even fully known or understood, and there wasn't any kind of genetic sequencing like we have today either. Optical microscopes were the height of technology. So there were probably half a dozen variants knocking about which nobody knew about or was able to identify and label. And yet, at some point, people eventually managed to contain the pandemic so that it fizzled out and no new cases were recorded.
So I guess my point is, identifying and tracking all the different variants of the virus may be a feat of modern bioscience, but not all of the additional information we gain from it is useful. And even if you do manage to track down all the carriers of a specific strain, again, it doesn't mean an even more harmful strain can't emerge at the same time somewhere else.
The fundamentals haven't changed, but there are a lot of new challenges - jet aviation being one of the biggest. The black death travelled at walking pace, the Spanish flu at the speed of a train, but a modern pandemic can go anywhere in the world overnight. The Spanish Flu "fizzled out" by killing most of the susceptible population, which I don't think is an acceptable outcome today.
The word "unprecedented" has been horribly over-used of late, but we've really never seen a virus like Covid-19. I can understand why the conspiracy theorists think that it's man-made, because it has a cluster of really vicious attributes that make it difficult to live with. It's more deadly and vastly more infectious than any strain of the flu and seems to be mutating faster than we expected.
We will eventually get back to normal, but "it'll all be over by Christmas" has been proven wrong once and I think it'll be proven wrong again. Vaccines and lateral-flow tests have given us better options for controlling the virus and we have good reason to be optimistic, but they don't solve the problem and we still need to be cautious. Boris' insistence that this will be the last lockdown could be undone by a single mutation.
>I can understand why the conspiracy theorists think that it's man-made, because it has a cluster of really vicious attributes that make it difficult to live with. It's more deadly and vastly more infectious than any strain of the flu and seems to be mutating faster than we expected.
Just look around you at the astounding life forms that evolution all on its own has been able to create for billions of years. Including us. It's a bit like creationism which argues that humans can't have just evolved spontaneously because we're too complex. But we didn't, and neither did Sars-CoV-19. It's all the cumulation of an endlessly long evolution, with many tiny incremental steps of evolution's classic trifecta of mutation, selection, and retention.
The genetic traits of Sars-CoV-19 may look like somebody created a super bug in a lab which is just about difficult enough to bring down entire national economies, but which still leaves most people without serious long-term harm so that the whole lot of us get to suffer from all the ramifications of an ailing world economy for years. In that sense, it does almost sound like a world domination master plan by some 1970s Bond villain. Except it's really not that likely.
>>31593 Do they not understand that the conditions the second bug would be released into are significantly different to the conditions covid was released into, making any sort of "practice" useless?
Of course not they are magical thinking thick heads who are one step away from "if it rhymes it must be true". You could never talk them out of it rationally because they don't care about details like facts, it feels right to them and makes them smarter than everyone else. The only way of convincing them of something else is to get them to believe the first piece of conspiracy nonsense was merely something 'they' wanted you to believe.
To a certain kind of mind, extraterrestrial lizard Jew overlords are a satisfactory replacement for the spiteful and capricious god of the Old Testament. Weird as it might seem, the idea that we're being tormented by a secret cabal who control everything is less scary to some people than the fact that we're just bald apes on a rock spinning through space.
Us poor sods have to deal with the fact that bad things happen all the time for no particular reason, but they get to believe that one day they'll conquer the extraterrestrial Jew lizards and nothing bad will ever happen again. We believe that sometimes kids get incurable cancer and there's nothing anyone can do except hope for a medical breakthrough that might never come, but they believe that if they just tear down all the 5G masts and get rid of vaccines then everyone will live in perfect health forever.
>Of course not they are magical thinking thick heads who are one step away from "if it rhymes it must be true".
I remember one disturbing news report I saw on TV in the run-up to Obama's election win in 2008. They were talking to Republican voters at a McCain rally, and this rootin tootin y'all drawlin' Texas woman said to the reporter with not even a shred of doubt or irony, "Come on... Obama... Osama... they're the same thing!".
Things have only taken a turn for the worse since then, as we all know.
You've taken the stance that it is about quenching existential dread, like my Mother who believes "God must be working mysteriously using the corona virus for good to bring us all closer together"
I disagree, I think it is an unearned arrogance of narcissism of having to one up smart people like my father who believes "Jesus and angles were spacemen that's the reason they are painted with "halos", look at them they are space helmets”.
Yes the NHS has considered my mental health a 'write-off'
>"Jesus and angles were spacemen that's the reason they are painted with "halos"
Except the first images of haloes sometimes predate Christian iconography by centuries, and are even found in other cultures that had no contact with Christianity at the time, for example there are 2000-year-old Buddha statues from India.
So either all or most religions were founded by aliens, or something doesn't track.
Then again, if religions really were founded by aliens, it would explain many things. Even Jesus walking on water may actually have happened, and could have been made possible by some kind of alien anti-gravity device.
>>31607 >Even Jesus walking on water may actually have happened, and could have been made possible by some kind of alien anti-gravity device.
That's ludicrous science fiction, it would be much easier to have a device that just increases the surface tension of water.
>it would be much easier to have a device that just increases the surface tension of water.
Not feasible, because you would have to increase the surface tension pretty much for the entire body of water you are walking on. Because if you only do it for the area where your feet touch it, you would still sink because of the lower surface tension beyond the edges of your footsteps.
Nonsense, if you just have something that increases the surface tension most of all where you're standing then incrementally less the further away it gets (maybe a metre or two) then your weight will be distributed in a large circle. It's far more practical than anti-gravity which would do all sorts of weird things to air pressure given that it's not within an enclosed space.
Well anyway, alien Jesus had it figured out somehow. If he was able to part an entire marginal sea for his people to walk through on foot, then surely doing a spot of water walking was no challenge for him.
>Looking back on the beginning of the pandemic, Hayward, a professor of infectious disease epidemiology at UCL, said: “I think one of the reasons that we’ve had so many deaths is that we left things far too late, in terms of taking more restrictive measures.
>“We should have been taking social distancing measures – if not a full lockdown then other measures that were trying to separate people – much earlier. At that time, of course, we also didn’t really have the same mechanisms to measure how much disease there was in the community, so we were largely only really seeing the tip of the iceberg of cases.
