I'm fully bracing for downvotes, but I really think that having professional immunologists/scientists/etc. interacting directly with Twitter masses off of fresh-off-the-presses data (weak data, at that) is a mistake. For a few reasons: (a) it creates an environment where everyone wants to "break the news" first, even if it's full of hot takes, incorrect, or incendiary. This isn't a big deal when breaking who the Kardashians are dating, but it's very dangerous when talking about public health policy. And (b), there's zero accountability. If this entire thread ends up being wrong -- as so many of these Twitter hot takes have been proven to be wrong from last year -- no one cares. It's memory holed, and the good professor is just happy for the 15-minute limelight today, without worrying about what happens tomorrow.
I know this is not a particularly popular opinion, but I think we have things like peer review, the three sigma rule of thumb, and so on, for good reason. It's disappointing to see scientists spew out an entire thread and then cap it off with "just my opinion, so who knows" -- just as dishonest as crypto pumpers and their "not financial advice" disclaimers. Give me a break.
I'm happy you got your Twitter engagement though, that's what it's all about.
You’re not wrong. On the one hand it’s great to have a public forum for science, on the other I’ve learned I can’t vet it at all, so I should wait until they get farther along before reacting at all. After all, Twitter has predicted 45 of the last 2 consequential variants.
As an individual that’s fine. As a society, we’ve got you and me who’ve learned to hold back, friends and alarmists who react to every signal to their own detriment and risk drowning out the real message, and we’ve got disillusioned trolls who cherry-pick the noise to “prove” scientists aren’t trustworthy.
I don’t know if it’s possible to have the open conversation while cooling off the side effects.
On the other hand, professional immunologists/scientists/etc on twitter have posted stuff on Twitter that governments wanted to suppress or just didn't care enough to act on.
Yes but in this case the poster is commenting on a public statement from the South African government so we're typically not in the situation you're talking about.
That's a tough one. I had a similar reaction: this is science, not tabloid, why are we mixing the two? On the other hand, Twitter is a weird-ass mechanism that can disseminate all sorts of information instantly. On the third hand, information is not knowledge, they are two very different things: Knowledge is power, Information seems to cause chaos.
I'd prefer we stick to the research paper format for stuff like this where there is a distinct space for results, and a distinct space for conclusions. Let's make knowledge out of the information first.
This pretty much concurs with the current BBC reporting, just with more graphs: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-59418127 It's honestly better than I'd expect from any of the usual American publications these days as well.
I’m not sure why people are posting Twitter threads but this is headline news, at least in the UK, and that news doesn’t seem to stem from this thread. The UK has also added several southern African customers to the travel red list again and they aren’t doing that late in the evening based on a random Twitter thread.
> there's zero accountability. If this entire thread ends up being wrong -- as so many of these Twitter hot takes have been proven to be wrong from last year -- no one cares.
It is true in many cases, but I feel like anyone who has contributed _as an expert in epidemiology_ has a good track record on correcting their statements. Did I miss anything worrisome?
This assumes that a correction or retraction will necessarily spread with the same dynamics of the original statement. The distribution network, and the motivations of other actors spreading the information, is more important the person making the original statement. In this case, much of Twitter is the appeal to emotional responses, not rational ones. And as a medium for information conveyance is just terrible (16 tweets for something like this is evidence of that fact). Given that, I expect that any real value to the message here will be completely lost, as would that of any correction or retraction, because those amplifying the message will be doing so on the basis of their own prior sentiments on response to the diseases.
All considered I feel the point of the original comment.
On twitter, the correction should have the roughly same audience as the original — unless you stop following the author. People who amplified the original still share that amplification.
My point still stand: I have not seen an epidemiologist write something that proved false without a clarification. Non-specialist write uninformed things but it’s not really new.
Feigl-Ding holds doctorates in both epidemiology and nutrition, with his professional experience in nutritional epidemiology and epidemiology of chronic disease. Since this professional experience and research work are not in infectious disease epidemiology, the subfield most relevant to COVID-19, Feigl-Ding has been criticized for offering viral social media and other media commentary on the COVID-19 pandemic.
---
I think readers should form their own opinion on whether to label him a "scammer epidemiologist".
The only reference to a forecast in that article is a "chair of the department of medical ethics", not an epidemiologist, on a television program, not a tweet that they can comment.
The primary author seems to have a lot of incorrect positions though:
"Ioannidis estimated that deaths in the U.S. from COVID-19 could potentially be as low as 10,000—or they could approach levels not seen since the flu pandemic of 1918"
"writing to President Trump of his concerns about the lack of evidence regarding the efficacy of lockdowns"
And just like with the Y2K bug one of the issues with takes like this is that it ignores all of the work that people did to prevent it becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. If there were no vaccines, lockdowns or similar health measures maybe the predictions would have been accurate.
Eh, Indy SAGE (of which the author is a member) can be quite cranky. Just because the UK Government are terrible and SAGE advise the UK Government doesn't intrinsically make Indy SAGE any good.
Specifically, Indy SAGE are eternal doom-mongers. Most of what they say is completely out of proportion in this vaccines era of COVID.
They also scream “close the borders” _all_ _the_ _damn_ _time_. This is (a) generally pointless when COVID is everywhere, and moreover the UK is doing worse than many countries. Also, (b), it helps perpetuate the UK's dangerous anti migrant rhetoric. Just yesterday people drowned in the English Channel as a result of the UK's hostility to refugees, and a bunch of xenophobic politicians feigned horror.
Agree, but I would widen this critique quite far into Twitter and social media in general. The motivation to promulgate information, factual or otherwise, on social media is attention-seeking, not truth-seeking. The method is sticky because it rewards attention-seeking with the desired attention, thereby optimizing on the kind of information, factual or not, that gains attention.
However, had the link been one of the many news articles on this topic rather than a tweetbarf, I think this comment would not be at the top, and we'd be talking about the virus instead.
Tough call here. If it ramps up the pressure to stop this before it spreads to quickly thats a win - the risk is if it isn't as dangerous and the new rules cause backlash amongst the fatigue.
Also putting that information out into twitter will get to the right people and the wrong people (i.e. people who can understand whats she's saying and people who aren't) and then the information gets used in multiple different ways.
I think you’ll find it’s a popular opion, but not one you’ll find espoused much on Twitter. I like to think you and people like me are the “silent majority”.
While it’s fascinating to see this stuff out in Public, it’s the same kind of fascination I had when Trump started diplomacy via Twitter, or when I saw my neighbours have a shouted domestic argument on their front lawn…
This is more for other scientists, science-twitter is quite a big thing and often how scientists communicate new results, pre-prints, job-postings etc. It's just sad that the media and lay-people are ruining one of the only positives twitter provides.
Could not agree more. I also strongly disagree with the use of highly emotive words like "horrific" mutations. Exactly how are they horrific, given how little anyone knows about this variant? In my opinion, it's incredibly irresponsible public fearmongering.
FWIW my trust in academia, and specifically medical, will never return.
I knew that the pandemic was far from over with in the US even with the mass vaccination campaign being declared mostly a success this summer.
On a worldwide scale, given the rates plus the raw numbers in locales plus mobility within borders along with people crossing borders...it simply did not add up.
Plus, Americans are a very polarized group of people. (I say this as an American citizen living abroad who is also culturally American and has lived there the vast majority of her life.). Some counties in the United States had 25-30% vaccination rates at best right before the fall season. (I have not recently checked.)
But, I do recall reading that the US created a model (which of course is frequently being updated) for coronavirus spike protein mutations that would predict when the virus was statistically likely to evolve in such a way. I think it was a DARPA funded program or something like that. So, it’s not like this new “big news” came out of nowhere.
But, what is going on in the ascribed South African province in the above linked Tweet is unlikely to just be random coincidence. First, it is South Africa’s most populated province at around 15 million people. Second, it’s nearly summer in South Africa and it’s been hot there. Overall, we need people to investigate and for people to stop transmitting things that are not covered well and balanced, making many of us susceptible to confirmation bias.
But, stopping virus transmission altogether should have been our goal worldwide. Very few countries have succeeded. Yes, the WHO failed but so did the vast majority of the world’s countries.
Deeply agree with your sentiment, yet, information yearns to be free? No not quite the right catchphrase. As a society we need mechanisms developed to rapidly peer review at a kind of instant level, "quality report", "new untrusted", "rehash of wacko". Some indication. Sometimes some twitter threads that are authentic do this. The disinformation threads badly need stronger vetting,
and rapid discrediting or deletion.
If the scientist is completely wrong then the impact is that governments and the public took precautions that were unnecessary. But most of those impacts e.g. banning visitors from hot-spots, stronger health measures e.g. mask-wearing come with limited downsides and potentially huge upsides i.e. saving lives.
So it seems like that scientists should do more to engage with the public and communicate any potential threats as clearly and early as possible.
I call this the "No True Lockdown" argument. If they fail to indefinitely prevent significant outbreaks (and in nearly every case they have), well, it just means they weren't implemented soon enough. Even if they drag on for weeks and months with zero cases, only to have an outbreak at the slightest loosening of restrictions. I guess the idea is that if the entire world did this at once the virus would disappear? Completely unworkable, and almost surely false, given the existence of animal reservoirs.
Your entire framing of these policy choices as inevitable and the only option is baseless. Australia and New Zealand used to be held up as the shining lights of "just act fast enough and you can avoid the need for any sustained restrictions" and now we are seeing just how well kicking the can in that way actually works, and the lengths that must be gone to keep kicking it.
I really don't want to ban you, but you've not only ignored our request to stop using HN as a single-purpose account for ideological battle, you've increasingly crossed into flamewar since then. That's exactly the opposite of ok, so I don't see what choice we have; I've banned the account. This has been a problem for a long time, btw:
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Is there a way to vouch for the account not to be banned?
This account is one of a few I followed regularly, precisely to maintain some ability for "intellectual curiosity" among the innuendo of the opposite. I don't think there is a reason to believe this person has an agenda. It is just an emotional breakthrough during unprecedented times.
Bad things happen when people are banned for "transgressions" like this one.
I don't see why you put "transgressions" in quotes. What do you think we should do when people repeatedly flout our requests to stop breaking the site rules?
Please don't fulminate or post flamewar comments or call names on HN. All that is against the site guidelines, and we ban accounts that do it. You've unfortunately been doing these things repeatedly. If you'd please stop that, we'd appreciate it.
I'm not sure I understand - that was the official position at the time, not a 'hot take' on Twitter. The problem with experts getting it wrong is experts getting it wrong, not the unfiltered fire hose that is Twitter.
Edit: To clarify this is not a judgement on experts getting things wrong. Experts can't know everything.
sorry off topic, but what in the world is your last idiom there referring to? is there something i don’t know about art grants and the underground primate market?
(while i’m asking, why is everything in the future so heavy?)
It's a reference to Bored Ape Yacht Club a popular - at least with Crypto people - series of NFTs. If you use Twitter and follow any Crypto people/VCs you might have seen them as profile pictures. One of these sold for $200k. It's a JPEG :)
Remember the spike needs to bind to the ACE receptor which is what vaccines target, so if it escapes vaccines, it probably isn’t going to be as easily infectious. Maybe.
SA has low levels of vaccination, but they've had high infection rates. There should be substantial levels of immunity to earlier variants in the population. It's not directly comparable, but it should be possible to get some idea of how well the new variant escapes existing immunity.
Your answer seems to assume that the distribution of spike proteins which binds to the ACE is very close to the one for which we obtain immunity by getting vaccinated.
Yet we can already see that Delta binds better than the early strains and the efficacy of existing vaccines against it is like 60%, which contradict that. Does it make sense?
The infection rate in South Africa when this variant arose was extremely low.
This variant has not had to compete with Delta at all.
It established itself in a vacuum of infections, and it may all be due to founder effects, with a new wave of infections due to behavior or other changes.
I'm also very skeptical that P681H is suddenly going to flip the script and start displacing P681R.
SA also has low vaccination rates and its not obvious that this variant arose because of selection for immune evasion (even if it did, immune evasion from NAbs is probably inevitable and will happen forever).
Ah, I hadn't grasped your irony. I heard it suggested somewhat seriously recently, which miffed me a bit. Lockdowns were probably the least awful option in early 2020, but as you know it doesn't make them a great idea now.
My understanding is that parent was not joking. It's a great thought experiment though, and let's not forget that humanity did eradicate a number of diseases.
I wholeheartedly agree if worded as "people who can afford to but don't seem to be able to sit quietly in their homes for two weeks". I guess that's what you intended anyway.
(not everyone can afford to, e.g. they need to work for money for food, or they need to provide _actually_ essential public services.)
Names looking similar to the one of this variant have been mentioned on the news already, so it might not be completely surprising for some people that this is about SARS-Cov2.
The nomenclature is called PANGO by the way. It is named after the software tool "Phylogenetic Assignment of Named Global Outbreak Lineages" (PANGOLIN) which is used to classify lineages of SARS-Cov2.
There are several effective anti-virals in the approval pipeline. Vaccines plus the antivirals combined will hopefully crater severe cases and this will become just another cold virus.
Its a developing situation. What exactly it means isn't clear yet. Booster 3 is almost certainly still helpful but how helpful against this strain requires more science. Booster 4 (at least in the near term) would continue to probably do nothing further because its not a simple matter of more boosters at the same time equal more protection. That's just not how it works.
People seem to want to treat covid as if its a school assignment; as if there is a teacher giving you harder and harder homework in an arbitrary fashion who knows what is going to happen and you can ask them. Its not - this is the real world. Answers come when people test out theories and discover what's what. Its a process, and it takes time. What the article is saying basically is that there is a lot of uncertainty but what we do know so far is concerning.
Depending on who you listen to, well, you might need boosters every few months for the rest of your life. There's concern in some circles that because the vaccine trains your body to respond strongly to one specific version of one specific part of COVID, it permanently reduces your body's ability to learn how to counter different parts of other versions of COVID --- meaning that once you start taking boosters, you'll need them forever. It's unclear how much of a point this camp has.
The basic argument is that if you are vaccinated, and then contract the virus, the immune system will only produce antibodies for the spike protein in the vaccine, and it will not “learn” how to attack other parts of the virus.
If a new variant has a spike protein different enough, then you will not be in a better situation than an individual with no vaccine and no previous contact with the virus.
In contrast, someone with natural immunity would have the ability to produce a wider range of antibodies that target many different parts of the virus, therefore many more variants would be vulnerable to at least some of the antibodies.
(Caveat: the immune system actually is more complex than that)
> If a new variant has a spike protein different enough, then you will not be in a better situation than an individual with no vaccine and no previous contact with the virus.
That's quite a different claim to "it permanently reduces your body's ability to learn how to counter different parts of other versions of COVID".
> In contrast, someone with natural immunity would have the ability to produce a wider range of antibodies that target many different parts of the virus
This is a very different argument that natural infection gives more effective immunity than vaccination, and the empirical evidence does not seem to agree.
> That's quite a different claim to "it permanently reduces your body's ability to learn how to counter different parts of other versions of COVID".
Here the argument is that, when the antibodies “learned” from the vaccine have a low, but not nil, effectiveness, then the immune system of a vaccinated person would continue producing only the same antibodies. A person with natural immunity would instead be able to modulate the immune response and use the most effective among the many antibodies that they can produce.
> This is a very different argument that natural infection gives more effective immunity than vaccination, and the empirical evidence does not seem to agree.
There is some evidence that natural immunity lasts longer, although it is not settled yet.
So far, not much: it appears that there are very few cases confirmed (10 so far). If all those people isolate and don’t contaminate anyone, that could be the end of it. But one of them just flew on an intercontinental flight, so… yeah, things might not be contained.
If even one of them transmit to someone else, who transmit is themselves… this could spread like the Delta variant. There has not been any clinical test on the effectiveness of vaccines, of course; however, with so many mutations, in particular the mutations on the parts that code the spike protein, the vaccines that have proven effective so far (which focus on that spike) are likely to be far less effective. It’s likely we would develop new vaccines, but that presents more risk, so would need more tests, etc. Lockdowns are likely in the meantime.
> it appears that there are very few cases confirmed (10 so far). If all those people isolate and don’t contaminate anyone, that could be the end of it.
What makes you think that a set of mutations like this can evolve only once? Even if this particular lineage of COVID goes extinct, its existence demonstrates that the virus is responding to selection pressure in the way you'd expect any organism to respond under conditions of natural selection. If evolution can pull of B.1.1.529 once, it can do so again and again.
Boosters of the same vaccine will make the effect of a vaccine to last longer, if its protection diminishes with time. Other variants are present too, so regardless if this particular variant spreads to your zone or not, it probably won't harm.
The problem if is this variant is different enough to the original variant for the vaccine to be effective against it or no.
“We do know that B.1.529 has many more mutations than other variants and has mutations seen in other variants that are associated with BOTH higher transmissibility AND immune escape.”
Is there any reason to believe that higher infectivity should correlate with lower lethality? i.e. the virus which keeps its host alive the longest has greatest opportunity to replicate and spread?
Yes, there's kind of a triad of attributes that affects a virus and it's ability to cause a pandemic. Virulence (how sick people become), transmissibility (how easy does it spread), lethality (can it kill at high rate).
-higher virulence causes people to stay at home more, and less spread in community
-higher transmissibility means more spread person to person
-high lethality means people die faster and not spread as fast
SARS and MERS before SARS-COV2(COVID) all had high lethality and therefore those that were infected didn't get a chance to transmit to others that well, and likely helped slow the spread. COVID seems to have a good balance between the three.
The above is a big simplification, but the general idea sticks.
Your model is missing one big variable and that is latency, the time difference between when people are most contagious and when they are symptomatic.
SARS-1 had low latency, and so people tended to become contagious and symptomatic at around the same time, reducing transmission. Whereas SARS-2 has a high latency which helps it to spread while people are unaware they even have it. This also insulates SARS-2 from selective pressure to reduce its virulence.
It should be noted that for Sars-Cov-2 specifically (i.e. given a virus that has the properties of Sars-Cov-2 already) lethality will likely be a neutral factor for the evolution going forward. The reason being that viral titres peak around day 2 in a window of 1-5 days, whereas it takes at lot longer to die from Covid. In other words there is same sort of cap where lethality prevents transmission, but Sars-Cov-2 is nowhere near it.
In both the natural and leaky-vaccine scenarios, the virus evolves towards an ecological equilibrium, but in the leaky-vaccine scenario, that equilibrium is shifted in the direction of greater lethality. See the linked article: as a direct consequence of mass vaccination of chickens, Marek's diseased evolved from a minor illness into a highly-virulent, highly-transmissible disease that causes 100% lethal cancer in chickens unless the chicks are vaccinated before they hatch from their eggs.
What do you think about this article, by the author of the Marek’s disease study, that criticizes extrapolating from the chicken scenario to the covid scenario?:
The core argument is that Marek kills in 10 days or less, which is too soon for viral spread to happen. MDV vaccines keep chickens from dying, thus spread of hot variants can occur. Since covid doesn't kill that much, Marek phenomenon can't happen. The obvious issue with the argument is that the hot lethal variants are observed post vaccine availability. Earlier strains were "mild" or "virulent", but not "very virulent plus". "Death was relatively rare".
From an 1998 article on Marek, there appear to have been at least 3 jumps in Marek virulence, one in the late '50s pre vaccines (mild => virulent) and two post vaccine availability (virulent => very virulent, very virulent => very virulent plus), see chart on page S50.
"MDV became increasingly virulent over the second half of the 20th century [19,21–24]. Until the 1950s, strains of MDV circulating on poultry farms caused a mildly paralytic disease, with lesions largely restricted to peripheral nervous tissue. Death was relatively rare. Today, hyperpathogenic strains are present worldwide. These strains induce lymphomas in a wide range of organs and mortality rates of up to 100% in unvaccinated birds."
The conclusion of the rebuttal article you linked to is rather terrifying. If there ever was a "the road to [chicken] Hell is paved with good intentions", this is it.
"In the history of human and animal vaccines, there have not been many cases of vaccine-driven evolution. But in every one of them, individuals and populations have always been better off when vaccinated. At every point in the 50-year history of vaccination against Marek’s disease, an individual chicken exposed to the virus was healthier if it was vaccinated."
(1) from m MDV to v MDV strains in the late
1950s;
(2) from v MDV to vv MDV in the late 1970s;
(3) the appearance of the putative vv + pathotype
in the early 1990s (Figure 4).
Each occurrence has been associated with greater disease losses which have persisted until introduction of the next generation of vaccine. The reason for the shifts remain speculative. Shifts in the 1970s and 1990s may have been in response to certain MD vaccines. Kreager (1996) has suggested vaccines may have only a 10-year useful life before new strains evolve. The shift in the 1950s occurred prior to vaccine use, but may have been related to changes in poultry husbandry, especially the move towards larger houses and the increasing density of poultry operations in certain geographic regions"
m = mild, v = virulent, vv = very virulent, vv+ = very virulent plus, as explained on page S46, Table 1.
To be very clear, Marek is not covid. I am drawing no equivalence. I just point out that Andrew Read's 2021 articlet is built around a weak argument.
There is selection pressure on the virus to avoid severe symptoms, because hosts that are up and being sociable are better vectors for the virus than hosts that are in bed or hooked up to tubes in hospital.
However, there is also selection pressure for the virus to infect cells more efficiently and reproduce in greater quantities. These traits tend to correlate with the virus being more dangerous to the host.
The way the virus transmits before the host becomes symptomatic is quite an effective strategy for the virus, and means the selection pressure for the virus to not cause symptoms is less than it otherwise would be.
I recently found this video that shows and comments the worldwide evolement of variants over time. It is astonishing just how dominant Delta has become.
To me this was more entertaining than a marble race.
Sucks to be the South African government: too poor to vaccinate efficiently, shares data with rest of the world in "excellent" meetings, gets immediately quarantined via airline bans. And then we wonder why countries tend to be secretive...
Note I'm not saying we shouldn't trigger transfer bans (we should), but there should be a compensation mechanism that goes with them - like money or free vaccines. Otherwise poor countries have no incentive to cooperate.
South Africa's big problem with vaccination right now seems to be that they're running out of willing people to vaccinate - they just postponed a bunch of vaccine deliveries because their current stockpile is big enough already, and apparently a lot of people there are reluctant to get the vaccine.
I don't know the answer, but related: I read the manual that came with the new self tests and it mentioned what else it reacted to, like some micrograms of influenza type such and such. There was a whole host of things it responded to. They seem to just detect extremely broadly. Previous self tests didn't include this, I found it quite interesting.
Where there is a partially vaccinated population, yet still widespread infection, then there will be strong selection pressure for vaccine immune escape (and indeed prior infection immune escape).
It may not be this variant, but if such an escape variant emerged, it would quickly spread - assuming the mutations don't interfere too much with viability and transmission.
Vaccines, with other measures as necessary, should be used to suppress a highly contagious virus to nearly zero (trigger warning!!) to prevent this from happening.
Might be a blessing in disguise. People will become afraid well before it reaches their country. Maybe we actually have the willpower to stop it if it's actually quite lethal, and then it's indeed RIP (COVID). Since we apparently can't manage to announce a few months ahead a global 2 week lockdown, just stock up and afterwards nobody is infectious anymore. For the few essential people that need to be out (doctors, caretakers, police), switch on the last day and they now isolate for two weeks. Probably best to also add self-tests to the mix towards the end of the two weeks. Instead, so far, we'd rather have intermittent half-assed lockdowns for years on end and millions of deaths. Idk, a proper lethal variant (with the infectiousness before symptoms like it is now, else it wouldn't spread) might motivate us to solve the problem rather than to keep failing to try.
It's functionally impossible to have a global lockdown. Absolutely impossible for every country in the world at the same time. Just think outside your continent for 3 minutes.
Developing worlds, populations with millions living in poverty. Billions of people without the money to buy things two weeks in advance. Millions of food producers without the facility to produce and store 2 weeks worth of things for people. Now consider enforcement, healthcare, transportation, logistics, communication, borders, active wars and civil wars going on right now, etc. Let alone the normal international political cooperation needed.
It's actually totally impossible for it to happen simultaneously at a global level. I'd say it's probably also impossible for the majority of countries in the world (i.e. not rich) to have an effective lockdown at all at any time.
Even with a global lockdown, there will always be a reservoir of virus somewhere.
Some immunocompromised people can carry the virus for weeks.
Also, what about households where one person catches COVID the day before lockdown, incubates for a few days (asymptomatically), then transmits it to another person in the household, who also incubates for a few days...
At the end of the two week lockdowns, some people will still be contagious.
It's easy for a variant to become dominant just by random chance if the prevalence is low. That's the case here. Alpha and Delta were quite different, they took over when the case counts were high, so it was basically impossible for founder effects to be the reason.
So in this case we need to rely much more on the circumstantial evidence (which admittedly seems pretty solid on a first skim).
This is still a handful of cases (10 total, the only comparison curb I've seen is on three cases in Botswana; there could be one on six other cases in South Africa). We’ll know more soon, and hopefully, local health authorities will contain anything worrisome, but this is not yet like Delta with thousands of cases emerging overnight in some countries.
If you mean that Delta original advance wasn’t hindered by the vaccines, but Nu will be… it’s not clear that the vaccines will be very effective if it spreads. The spike protein looks quite different.
Yes, I've also been really surprised by this. The fact that South African wastewater coronavirus detection is spiking dramatically [1] makes me wonder if this variant could be a genuine step up from the current status quo.
Something that's frustrating about this type of situation which is probably going to arise many more times over the next few years; time is of the essence in this type of situation, and whilst detailed research into the nature of the mutations in this variant takes time, but basic data that doesn't take much time to gather is still not being shared.
When hearing about a bunch of cases discovered to have this new variant, it would help to assess the situation if we knew data related to each case: vaccination status, age, viral load, severity, etc.
All those details must have been collected already, and would indicate exactly how much of a concern the new variant is or isn't.
Definitely just need a combination of fast alterable vaccines, good public health (vit d, lower weight), and reasonable masking around vulnerable people.
> For the majority of us the virus poses no danger.
It does if emergency services and ICUs are at capacity and nobody can get treated for anything or medical personnel is so overworked they make mistakes or burn out.
That is basically what has happened anyway, at least to health services in the UK (and more specifically, in Wales where I live). Covid cases make up a very small proportion of total patients, total patient numbers are significantly lower than average for the time of year (and that has been true since March 2020), yet you cannot now get an ambulance unless you are essentially dying, and availability of routine healthcare (at least, what NHS normally offered) has nosedived.
This number of mutations isn't enough to completely change the mechanics of the virus. It's still the same thing in different clothing which might be enough to pass through the vaccine firewall, but the lethality won't be much different. I don't have to be a biologist to apply basic logic.
> This number of mutations isn't enough to completely change the mechanics of the virus.
One mutation can be enough, if its the right mutation.
> I don't have to be a biologist to apply basic logic.
Basic logic only helps if you start with accurate premises, which having an understanding of the relevant biology helps a lot with. Otherwise, you end up with GIGO.
> This number of mutations isn't enough to completely change the mechanics of the virus.
Maybe. Maybe not. The majority of the mutations in the B.1.1.529 genome are expressed as changes in the spike proteins but others are not and remain to be better understood. It is too early to tell what effects those remaining mutations will have on the lethality of this variant. If those mutations result in more efficient intracellular replication or other changes in intracellular viral life-cycle efficiency, then the morbidity and mortality may be greater, independent of immunologic escape.
well at least you're not making sweeping generalizations with no references/citations/sources on a field of research you admittedly aren't a part of...
I know this is not a particularly popular opinion, but I think we have things like peer review, the three sigma rule of thumb, and so on, for good reason. It's disappointing to see scientists spew out an entire thread and then cap it off with "just my opinion, so who knows" -- just as dishonest as crypto pumpers and their "not financial advice" disclaimers. Give me a break.
I'm happy you got your Twitter engagement though, that's what it's all about.