He's saying that since there all other variants we're susceptible to the vaccine, it's unlikely that this one is.
...and goes on to list the high number of different markers the vaccines target.
Unfortunately, vaccines largely target the spike proteins, and sequencing of omicron is demonstrating that every single protein marker on the spike is changed.
Vaccines will likely have a very small effect on this variant.
There are also two other mutations of concern that have never been seen together that each increase binding to ACE2 for cell entry.
This all needs to be formally confirmed, but this is probably BAD.
No. If every single “protein marker” on the spike protein was changed, there wouldn’t be a heck of a lot of chance for the virus to attach to a cell. There still needs to be basic compatibility with the cell and the spike to get inside.
> there wouldn’t be a heck of a lot of chance for the virus to attach to a cell.
but there isn't just a single shape that could be used to attach to a cell. Another shape could be compatible, but is not targeted by the vaccine of today.
I'm guessing that this makes the virus a different virus - but isn't that what mutations are? they are slowly causing the virus to change and at some point, it becomes a different virus.
What you’re talking about is a different form of evolution where there are effectively “multiple answers to the same problem”. A common example is if there are two bird species eat the same nut, they might have two very different beak shapes that both open that nut.
But that’s not how the type of evolution in a single virus works[0]. Within a single organism/virus, the evolution is more like finding a local minima. There certainly could be a more effective design with a different shape. But it is very difficult to break out of a local minima through mutation and natural selection. You still have to maintain the function of a protein while simultaneously mutating it. So, breaking out of a local minima is really difficult. As you said, evolution is a slow process, so you wouldn’t expect to see dramatic changes in a shape and keep the same function.
[0] I’ve deliberately left out things like horizontal gene transfer, transposons, and gene duplication, all of which can involve hyper mutation or gain of function without being under selective pressure.
You're right that the argument is fallacious, but you ALSO can't say that the high number of mutations make escape almost certain. Fact of the matter is, we don't know, and it's hard to say.
For there record, I'm predicting it would escape, but I'm far from certain about it, I'd put like a 75% prior.
If the variant is already on the rise couldn't we figure this out by looking at the demographics of who is infected (are most of the cases vaccinated people? Are people previously having covid getting this variant). I don't know anything about the field, but it seems like we shouldn't need that high an infection rate before we can start verifying these concerns empirically, especially when a large majority of the population is vaccinated.
A study in Nature had previously shown that >= 20 amino acid mutations on the spike protein was sufficient to cause immune escape from the vaccine or previous infection, but that individuals who were both previously infected and vaccinated were still able to neutralize the mutant virus. [1]
The omicron variant has >30 AA mutations on the spike protein, so it remains to be seen how effective vaccines are in response to it. Even if it is unable to prevent infection, it's still likely that the vaccines will provide some attenuation of severity, especially with a booster. We also now have pharmaceutical means to treat infections, so any notions that this will bring us back to March 2020 seem unrealistic.
> individuals who were both previously infected and vaccinated were still able to neutralize the mutant virus.
Mainly because of the infection, not the vaccination. Infection trains your immune response to detect multiple factors of the virus, the mRNA vaccines are only for the spike protein which has considerable mutations in later variants like this one.
Arguably, traditional dead-virus vaccines might provide better long-term protection for this reason, but we went all-in on the new tech.
Somatic Hypermutation works on vaccine antigens as well, and diversifies B-cells so that the B-cells will recognize many spike mutations. Anyone who has been vaccinated or recovered probably has some B-cells which match this spike, even if they're not amplified and expressed into circulating neutralizing antibodies.
T-cells on the other hand don't diversify as much but they recognize primarily the host MHC section of the MHC-antigen complex, so they're already somewhat insensitive to mutations in the protein. The T-cells stimulated by vaccine or virus aren't special in that regard.
Arguably it doesn't really matter. If you get infected with this spike it is still going to have pretty much the same shape as the spike in the vaccine (after all even the mutated versions still need to bind to ACE2 and can't vary that broadly) and your vaccine-trained T-cells will still bind fine to the antigen-MHC complex that the spike forms.
There's this idea that antibodies and immune responses are like a key fitting perfectly into a lock where any pin being wrong doesn't unlock the lock, and that's just false. The immune system has a need to fuzzy match against antigens because it evolved against adversaries which mutate and attempt to reinfect.
You're pushing a narrative that spike-only vaccines are worse in the face of mutation, and there's just no evidence of that. On the other hand mRNA spike-only vaccines allow creating a very strong humoral response to the spike protein in the absence of significant side effects and their efficacy has been so far across the board superior to inactivated virus or viral-vector vaccines.
> You're pushing a narrative that spike-only vaccines are worse in the face of mutation, and there's just no evidence of that
"Pushing a narrative" is a pretty uncharitable interpretation of a short off-hand comment.
There actually is some evidence that the infected have a stronger immune protection to exposure than the vaccinated, and there are mechanistic reasons this would make sense, so I wouldn't go so far as there's no evidence for it. We'll just have to wait and see.
There's mechanistic reasons why the infected would have weaker immune protection because other viral proteins like ORF8 suppress MHC-I expression and T-cell responses. All the studies that I've seen that look at the problem properly find that recovery from infection provides highly variable protection with younger and less severe symptoms providing much less than vaccination.
>Arguably, traditional dead-virus vaccines might provide better long-term protection for this reason, but we went all-in on the new tech.
That argument sounds good in theory, but we have data we can look at to assess — Sinovac is inactivated virus and it's efficacy was 50% against the early strains. Also, work has shown that spike antigen vaccines broaden the range of antibodies produced by previously infected immune system to increase neutralisation against later variants, even though the vaccines were of course based on ancestral spike protein sequence..
It started from an extremely low base.
And extrapolating that curve is completely wrong as you can see from today numbers. 2.8k compared to yesterday 2.4K.
It’s obviously still early to know anything conclusive but the relatively small increase today is a very good sign.
We’ll know something more next week.
"believes in" is an easy way to dismiss someone. The word "entertains" would be more accurate. The frequencies of ratios is correlated to the compositivity of the denominator. There's nothing crazy about horoscopes except taking them too seriously. There are very deep patterns in the construction of the universe, dictated by repeating patterns.
> I had, like Dewey and others, only gradually come to the understanding that these cycles arrive from outside the earth. Not only that, but quite a few of them fitted with planetary alignments, and many serious scientists or analysts do not want to go there because that is astrology and only quacks do astrology. However it is a fact that these relationships exist. There are several reasons why the planetary alignments match common cycle periods, and others why the Sun is affected by planetary alignments. Saying that does not make me an astrologer. Like many scientists I regard horoscopes as as a cruel trick played on gullible people.
Wait, I know some physicists and scientists who use Costar. It's almost always somewhat tongue-in-cheek, just a little fun to add spice to life. Not a 100% serious religious guide... in the same way I know serious scientists who own a and cleanse a few crystals for the 'aura.'
It's kinda like pointing at a scientist who plays DnD and carries a DnD good luck pin and saying "DnD isn't even real! It's just play."
> I had, like Dewey and others, only gradually come to the understanding that these cycles arrive from outside the earth. Not only that, but quite a few of them fitted with planetary alignments, and many serious scientists or analysts do not want to go there because that is astrology and only quacks do astrology. However it is a fact that these relationships exist. There are several reasons why the planetary alignments match common cycle periods, and others why the Sun is affected by planetary alignments. Saying that does not make me an astrologer. Like many scientists I regard horoscopes as as a cruel trick played on gullible people.
Biologists have to know statistics. Horoscopes are evidently impossible to anyone who knows basic statistics, if the generic fortunes weren't evident enough.
I've seen people with masters degrees in biology who are young earth creationists and don't believe in evolution. Never underestimate the ability of the human mind to form into the shape of a Klein bottle.
Are they? If the newspaper says Pisces is going to have a good day and Libra is going to have a bad day, I feel I'd have to ask way more people than I'm likely to meet to determine whether it's true or not. I don't know why you'd say it's evidently impossible.
Furries come from a broad cross-section of civilization, though tech has outsized representation as a profession. It's highly likely someone you know and respect is a furry.
"In recent weeks, infections have increased steeply, coinciding with the detection of B.1.1.529 variant. The first known confirmed B.1.1.529 infection was from a specimen collected on 9 November 2021.
This variant has a large number of mutations, some of which are concerning. Preliminary evidence suggests an increased risk of reinfection with this variant, as compared to other VOCs. The number of cases of this variant appears to be increasing in almost all provinces in South Africa"
In the EU
- previous infection and recovery gives you a COVID Pass
- some countries are doing a single shot after infection at most to count you as vaccinated (Spain I believe does this) which is consistent with the data we have
It’s mostly the US that has an insane vacine policy.
We'll see what happens with the large employer mandate, but as of now, I've been asked to show proof of vaccination 0 times in the US, while living a similar life to before the pandemic.
(I didn't spend much time in restaurants prior, I've cut that back, but then they aren't checking anyway)
> It’s mostly the US that has an insane vacine policy.
Source? There are plenty of other countries that require vaccinations and/or tests. I was recently checking Singapore, for instance, which still seems to require
one dose of a vaccine after recovery.
In Germany antibody tests aren't used for that determination. 6 months from PCR positive counts as "recovered" in the German scheme, afterwards you need a single mRNA shot on top to count as fully vaccinated.
At this point, if you are not immunocompromised and you have the first vaccination and a booster. You should be able to easily recover regardless of the mutation(s). The virus would need to completely diverge from SARS-CoV-2 in order to fully defeat the countermeasures of the current vaccinations.
Testing of vaccines against this new variant is already starting.[1] First results in 2 weeks.
Pfizer says that if they have to generate a new vaccine for this variant, it will take about 100 days.[2] That's the great thing about this mRNA vaccine technology - given the gene sequence of a virus, a vaccine can be designed. The original Moderna vaccine was designed in two days.
While I know nothing about vaccine development I guess that a "release often in small batches" might be a better mode than doing mass clinical trials which are slow and costly. As far as I know it's possible from a manufacturing standpoint as the updates would mostly be changes in mRNA code. I think people not dying from being properly immunized outweigh the risk of a small number of people facing side effects if done properly.
Not OP but I remember reading that with the way the vaccine works, as long as it’s classified as a variant you should be covered. If you’re not covered anymore (assuming the full vaccination is not outdated) that means it’s most likely a new virus rather than a new variant. I can’t find a proper link to quote tough, so you can assume this is totally wrong. Nevertheless, the logic behind it makes sense (to me at least).
Quick research tells me that Biontech does need two weeks to check if the vaccine works against the new variant [1], so clearly it does NOT need to be a new virus for the vaccine to become useless.
True but the mRNAs have held up well against every variant to this point. It's not even something I'm comfortable banking on against this new variant, but we're far from concluding this is a problem, too. Edit-I'm thinking it's like 66% against this VOC from escaping the vaccines and 33% pro, very roughly.
> However, Dr Angelique Coetzee, chair of the South African Medical Association and a practising GP based in Pretoria, said it was “premature” to make predictions of a health crisis.
“It’s all speculation at this stage. It may be it’s highly transmissible, but so far the cases we are seeing are extremely mild,” she said. “Maybe two weeks from now I will have a different opinion, but this is what we are seeing. So are we seriously worried? No. We are concerned and we watch what’s happening. But for now we’re saying, ‘OK: there’s a whole hype out there. [We’re] not sure why.’”
COVID has been weaponized politically. Any politician that doesn’t take part in counter-measure theatrics risks losing an election where they will be attacked for not doing enough.
There are already reports of (vaccinated) young people getting seriously ill.
Unlike with other viruses, there is little selective pressure towards being less deadly, because illness/death mostly happen after transmission.
And while I'm not a virologist, it doesn't seem far-fetched that "breeds higher viral loads more quickly" would be correlated not only with transmissivity, but also with "kills more".
“Mild” in this case means you don’t go to the hospital (and/or the morgue). It doesn’t rule out long COVID or extremely severe (from a layman’s perspective) symptoms.
And that’s the same as other “mild” COVID infections, yep. The ones where you don’t die. You ignorant dipshit.
How did he deserve it exactly? They were being snarky, sure, but population-wide infection hospitalization rate is estimated around 2-3%, so yes, the vast majority of Covid cases were mild. That's not even a controversial statement.
Yikes - attacking another user like that will get you banned here, regardless of how ignorant they are or you feel they are. We're trying to avoid this sort of degenerate spiral.
Attacking another user like that will get you banned here, regardless of how wrong they are or you feel they are, and regardless of how bad any other comment is. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
Have you never had a severe cold when you were young or did you get one of those stupid attendance trophies in school? Geez. I'm starting to wonder if anyone on Hacker news has ever gone through any hardship.
We don't know yet, the number of cases this variant has been confirmed in is far too low at this point. You'll likely get a better idea of what that mix of mutations means in terms of clinical aspects and transmissions in a few weeks, most of the current takes are educated guesses based on what this variant has in common with the previous ones.
> The virus would need to completely diverge from SARS-CoV-2 in order to fully defeat
Yeah, you shouldnt be making these claims if you don't have specific background or understanding of what you are talking about
All current vaccines target few/couple specific proteins and protein groups on the virus spikes which interact with our cells, if these couple spikes/protein groups change then the vaccines stop being effective, you don't need a complete divergence of the vaccines to stop working as the vaccines don't target the "whole virus" to begin with, just specific parts of it, that was the worry with Delta and is the worry with this new strain
> All current vaccines target few/couple specific proteins and protein groups
Since you have the specific background and understanding and know what you are talking about can you explain to us how inactivated virus covid vaccines target specific proteins ?
I would expect them to target the whole virus.
Current vaccines target key proteins necessary for attaching to the cell. If the virus stops expressing these proteins, it will be less fit at invading cells.
There is zero evidence at all for any antibody-dependent enhancement with the COVID vaccines so far.
The mRNA vaccines also induce the cell-mediated immunity, unlike e.g. subunit vaccines that only consists of a protein. The cell-based response is fundamentally different and not based on the 3D structure of the virus protein like the antibody response. So mutation that would evade the antibody response would not automatically evade the cell-based response as well.
The spike protein is also the most important protein of the virus. And antibodies are mostly useful against surface components of the virus, not so much against stuff that's on the inside. The spike protein performs a critical function, to evade the antibody response it has to do both, change enough to be unrecognizable while still being able to infect cells with a similar efficiency. That's not an easy thing to do.
Curious edit history. This pile of garbage originally used "vaxtard", "sin", and "purebloods". You really shouldn't take anything seriously from a source that uses those trigger phrases.
> Curious edit history. This pile of garbage originally used "vaxtard", "sin", and "purebloods". You really shouldn't take anything seriously from a source that uses those trigger phrases.
There's no edit histories on HN, unless I missed something.
Never forget the windowless buildings in Russia, where people are working to make you hate each other. At least make it harder for them than simple semiautomated tricks like this.
I saw what OP initially wrote before they started editing it down a bit. This is one of the ways that misinformation viruses spread. OP saw it on a radicalized forum somewhere, copied it into a less-radical forum and started watering the message down a little to aid in radicalizing others.
Variant21K appears to have arisen in November 2021, possibly in South Africa. Early sequences are predominantly from South Africa, though also detected in Botswana and Hong Kong.
21K is primarily of concern due to the large number of mutations it has in the Spike gene. Many of these variants are in the receptor binding domain and N-terminal domain, and thus may play key roles in ACE2 binding and antibody recognition.
This literally reads like post apocalyptic fan fiction.
>This literally reads like post apocalyptic fan fiction.
I find it incredibly fascinating how fast this virus can mutate in order to throw curveballs around our natural and engineered defenses and become more efficient at killing us.
How is this even possible in such a short amount of time? I thought evolution takes tens of thousands of years. It's not like viruses have giant brains with massive IQs to come up with all this so fast.
The probable cause for many variants of concern has been multi-month long infections in one immunocompromised person (obviously a different one each time), often treated with convalescent plasma or monoclonal antibodies to keep the disease in check but not cure it. This provided the virus a perfect optimization platform, and for it to quickly collect a group of mutually beneficial changes.
In the normal case the selective pressure isn't really there, since the virus will get beat back after a week or two anyway and just 1-2 point mutations probably didn't give it any significant advantage is infecting more hosts.
Given how many mutations this variant has compared to its most direct known ancestor, the former is almost certainly what happened in this case too.
Given a population of almost 8 billion and a six months head start you are now looking at a reservoir of many millions of people infected at any given time. Each of these will provide 1 to 100 billion new virions, and each of those is an opportunity for the virus to undergo a mutation, which RNA viruses are particularly receptive to because they lack the same level of error correction that DNA based viruses enjoy.
Edit: fixed bit about error correction, thanks somewhereoutth!
With that said, then a one sise fits all vacinne is highly unlikely, correct? That there will be variants and mutations that will out pace (so to speak) the protection a given jab is engineered to offer?
Long to short, if death prevention is the objective then we need to shift to finding solution that are less specific but still effective. For example, anti virals.
The immune system (and vaccines) operate mostly on the external bits of a viral particle.
These bits perform several critical functions: hiding from the immune system, attaching to cells the virus needs to replicate in, etc.
Changing any of these things results in two questions.
(1) Does the change make the virus better or worse at X? (where X is something related to what that bit was doing)
(2) Does the change make the virus more or less visible / resistant to the immune system?
The answer to both of these are independent, and for any one particular change, depends all the way down to chemistry and physics.
It's possible that a given virus design cannot mutate external features without rendering itself ineffective. It's also possible that relatively minor mutations can make it more effective and/or able to avoid antibodies and the immune system.
The mutation space has been studied for SARS-CoV-2, but to put it simply, it's a very complicated problem that involves (among other things) protein folding and molecular simulation. Not easy stuff to brute force.
The various vaccines have different ways of acting, some will be less specific but also less effective from the start, some will be more specific but run a higher chance of being outdated by future mutations, all of them can only be tested for efficacy against the known strains. So yes, this probably will remain.
It speaks to the more serious problem with vaccine hesitancy - the more virions (individual virus 'particles') that exist, the greater the chance of a mutation that finds a way around our defenses. It's just basic evolution.
The variants arise randomly and proliferate with the current major strains. The infected population adapts to reduce the transmission of the most virulent/contagious strains. Selective pressure (tug of war between infecting people and people fighting off the infection) increases on the new variants until one or a few maintain or exceed the transmission of the progenitor strain.
That's the problem with the, "I'll get over it/I'm not worried/My segment of the population doesn't die from it" mentality. The more infections - subclinical, asymptomatic, severe, fatal, undetected - the more rolls of the dice. We (humans) are selecting variants that are worse for us, hoping we can snuff out the infection before some key mutation that eludes our immune system and/or testing develops.
Two other thoughts with internal conflicts/points worth mentioning - First, recovered patients should be more resistant to new strains. Their immune systems threw everything at the virus to defeat it, so their response will be more diversified than those with mRNA vaccines targeting a specific protein sequence. (The magnitude and usefulness of the variations in immune response can negate that advantage.) Second, the reasons that a 'novel' virus is dangerous are that we, as a species, don't know if we can (naturally/innately), and we don't know how much the virus can change in protein sequence (to evade our defenses) or our response to infection.
Anyways, I'm rambling. Not a virologist, but a PhD (and as such, I think I know more about stuff than a really do) and that's how I think about it. :)
> That's the problem with the, "I'll get over it/I'm not worried/My segment of the population doesn't die from it" mentality. The more infections - subclinical, asymptomatic, severe, fatal, undetected - the more rolls of the dice.
The vaccines we're currently using don't prevent infection as they do not provide sterilising immunity. To quote[1] Sunetra Gupta[2], infectious disease epidemiologist and a professor of theoretical epidemiology at the Department of Zoology, University of Oxford:
> The vaccines that we currently employ appear to be highly effective in preventing life-threatening illness but do not meaningfully contribute to the maintenance of herd immunity.
> …we find ourselves trapped by the superannuated conviction that vaccines must block infection as well as disease.
Given that, how is contrasting those who've had vaccines with those who haven't of any relevance? We have other comments in the thread (like this one[3]) pointing out that it could be immuno-compromised people that are the main source of new variants. Right now, they're among the least likely people to have been vaccinated.
> We (humans) are selecting variants that are worse for us
I believe this to be a very common misconception. Evolution selects variants that are better at replicating. It does not follow that those are the worse for our health.
Imagine a variant that would effectively be very lethal to us: wouldn't it go extinct if the bearers die or even stay home sick before it can spread?
On the other hand the vaccines could be causing more stress on the virus as they generally aren't very good. I'm saying this as someone who had the virus then the vaccine.
I'm putting this delicately, but if we're worried about things that might cause cancer, we might want to look at the past 40 years of novel chemicals approved in household or environmental products.
I'm not saying short-term, high-intensity FDA et al. EUA is ironclad, but it's a helluva lot more stringent and reviewed than what the EPA approves (or fails to ban) due to "economic considerations."
So, if we're in the worrying mindset, prioritization seems important.
Other posters have addressed the other questions so I'll focus on your comment concerning "massive IQs to come up with all this so fast".
Evolution does not work that way. It is not a conscious decision or process on the part of the organism. It is the result of mutations due to imperfect copying of genetic material. Very likely most of the mutations are useless or harmful to the organism. But once in a while the mutation gives the organism an advantage and allows it and it's progeny to outcompete the other, unmutated organisms.
Even the process of evolution does not make decisions or have a particular direction or goal. It's all randomness and depends on the large number of chances.
As far as becoming more efficient at killing is, most viruses mutate to a state of being less deadly. Not killing the host is an advantage for a virus.
This is not actually a "goal" of the virus, since dead people cannot move and therefore spread much less of the virus. They seek to become more infectious so they can spread more, and in this process sometimes they also accidentally kill the host.
> Viruses don’t always become attenuated (less virulent). When they do, it’s because there is an evolutionary selection pressure driving it. No such pressure exists for SARS-CoV-2. An example of this type of selection pressure would be a virus that is so virulent, it kills its host before it can be transmitted to another one. A virus is essentially a machine programmed to make more viruses. To do that, it needs to be spread to new hosts. So variants that are so virulent they kill a host before that host can pass it along, that is under negative selection pressure. The more virulent viruses won’t be passed on. But attenuated variants will. They are under positive selection. For SARS-CoV-2, this has never been an issue. This virus can be transmitted to a new host before an infected person develops symptoms. Even those who die from COVID are most contagious before they become severely ill.
Viruses select only for transmissibility, nothing else. They do not select for virulence any more than any other number of factors that may or may not overall have an impact on transmissibility. To think a virus naturally becomes less virulent to become more transmissible ignores a raft of other factors such as its ability to generate viral load that the host spreads, its ability to evade host defenses, presymptomatic/asymptomatic capability of spread, etc. etc.
Numerous viruses throughout history have not become less virulent even over the course of thousands of years.
> How is this even possible in such a short amount of time? I
Mutations on organisms such as viruses depend on the raw amount of virus duplication which happens, not per se "time", if you have a large amount of hosts, and therefore high amounts of duplication that increases the duplication rate making it more likely that mutations will occur, therefore speeding up the mutation rate, and as it happens with large countries still not taking strong measures against covid there's ample amount of hosts which can incubate new mutations....
Also, ought be noted that mutation is entirely random, this is *not* "a consequence to vaccines existing", most mutations will be neutral, others negative to the virus itself, but few might have positive effects on its vitality, or incubation period or others
It has a much shorter lifespan thus in one human lifecycle it has a much more time to evolve. Humans (or other higher animals) are not powerless. They have sex. The random recombination of genes when reproducing can create an environment hostile to parasites/viruses in its offspring. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen_hypothesis for details.
Well, isn't the common cold the result of an endless stream of "curveballs" and thus why there's no prevention for it? That is, the virus that causes the common cold is actually numerous variants (not the exact same version of the virus).
The diversity of the virus species causing the common cold is actually much higher. There are rhinoviruses, adenoviruses, enteroviruses, and coronaviruses, among many others. It seems this symptom and transmission pattern is just very evolutionally successful.
NOT a ELI5 but this should give you a reasonable understanding.
Why are RNA virus mutation rates so damn high?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6107253/
"RNA viruses have high mutation rates—up to a million times higher than their hosts—and these high rates are correlated with enhanced virulence and evolvability, traits considered beneficial for viruses. However, their mutation rates are almost disastrously high, and a small increase in mutation rate can cause RNA viruses to go locally extinct"
Some bloke who was the head of Porton Down aka Public Health England when commenting on the London Plague pits found when digging the tunnel for Cross Rail suggested RNA viruses have a single helix so are prone to high levels of mutations unlike DNA which has the double helix checksum to reduce mutations.
This is probably the episode. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04cnps9
mRNA is not the only solution, some dietary changes can create a chemical based attack vector as your body has evolved to cope with extremes.
This just one example of many different chemical attack vectors.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7413200/
But I cant find the hacker news link on a paper from MIT which also suggested a 3 day fast reset the immune systems "memory" which was a novel way of wiping vaccine triggered immune system responses and probably isnt what you want to do if you believe in the covid vaccines, but if you are an anti-vaxxer forced into having a vaccine, then it could be a way of wiping its effect from your body if the study was accurate.
Now before you go out fasting, just bear in mind you will be depleting your body of many things like the vampire chemical glutathione (NAC, Glutamine & Glycin) which depletes as you age. Its called the vampire chemical because it whitens skin and makes you sensitive to light amongst other things so there might have been some truth to those vampire legends!
I know Vit D is mentioned alot, the Welcome Trust in Cambridge reversed engineered the human genome back a few years back and suggested there were 2776 Vit D receptors, most concentrated around the immune system genes, but the VDR has a zinc finger so you need to take zinc and both A & D will get you closer to hypercalcemia so that brings its risks, but in 1959 the scientific community did work out if you take A & D you need to take K to mitigate the risk of hypercalcemia. And if you are elderly, you should consider taking taurine as this helps the body manage the fats in your diet (bile) amongst other things, which explains why the elderly generally absorb A & D less easily or respond less to supplementation compared to young people. You'll find taurine in some wacky places in the body.
sarscov2 is already over the size threshold where it would mutate too much to survive and spread, so it has an error correcting mechanism, and as a result a much lower mutation rate than many other RNA viruses including the more prevalent smaller coronaviruses.
>Using this approach, this variant has been detected at faster rates than previous surges in infection, suggesting that this variant may have a growth advantage.
Really? I wonder how much of this is "it's very easy to spot in the pcr" and we don't have to Redeploy tests..
Should clarify: I'm not discounting the possibility that this variant spreads quickly, but given the known fact that it detects very easily, some sort of statistical modeling of how to correct for that (or a disclaimer that we are comparing apples to oranges) would be nice before making a pronouncement about rapidity
It is called variant of *concern* not variant of *panic*. So while it may be wise to stop travelling (European here) it is absolutely useless to speculate about the doom it brings.
Doom is what we already do with ineffective measures to fight Delta (German here).
I swear I’ve read a hundred articles saying “here’s what we should’ve done to prevent this pandemic”. Let’s see if any lessons have been really learned; a new variant is practice for the next virus that comes on the scene. With the testing tech we have now, proper tracing, quarantines, and travel restrictions, could a variant be bottled up?
Considering data from other non-human species, it seems implausible that we could prevent all possible future pandemics. We may be able to delay or mitigate some, but eventually nature has its way.
Omicron? Was not it Nu like few hours ago?
I like the longer name better. Our ministry of finance has already made a typo in a Facebook post calling it Mu (like the sound cows make).
The current official W.H.O. rationale, reported by the NYTimes [0]:
"Some other variants with Greek letters do not reach those classification levels, and the W.H.O. also skipped two letters just before Omicron — “Nu” and “Xi” — leading to speculation about whether “Xi” was avoided in deference to the Chinese president, Xi Jinping.
"“‘Nu’ is too easily confounded with ‘new,’” Tarik Jasarevic, a W.H.O. spokesman, said on Saturday. “And ‘Xi’ was not used because it is a common last name.”
"He added that the agency’s best practices for naming diseases suggest avoiding “causing offense to any cultural, social, national, regional, professional or ethnic groups.”"
thus to slow down and potentially bring the virus into complete disarray and stop it in its tracks we need to force the virus into the Six Sigma Lean Agile Scrum process.
They use the greek alphabet to avoid stigmatising or politicizing the origins the various variants. They also pick names that are easy to remember and pronounce as opposed to the more technical names (ie. B.1.1.529).
These names are for public consumption. The reality is a world of tens of thousands variants that are constantly evolving. The B.1.1.529 is from a computer program that names clusters of variants via a clustering algorithm.
Any thoughts on whether they would have done this greek alphabet thing had the first outbreak been in Africa instead of China? And why change now, when viruses (and variants) have long been named after the country or region where the first outbreak was recorded?
What if a second variant occured in the same country? We shouldn't be afraid of existing names that are taken from persons or placenames, but it's worth switching to better naming systems where they make sense.
o micron literally means "small o" and o mega literally means "big o", but those computer scientists, when they use "big O notation" they write it with an O. Omega is sad :(
To be fair, big O and little o have different meanings in asymptotic notation, and I guess it doesn't pronounce as well as "big omicron" and "little omicron". (Although Ω and ω are both used as well.)
Nu means naked in Portuguese (and Spanish I think?)
Maybe they wanted to avoid all the lazy puns. A pretty significant part of the world speaks either of those two languages.
Interesting choice to pick "Omicron" instead of "Nu," which news outlets had been expecting them to use. Perhaps this allows them to avoid having to use "Xi" as the name of a Covid variant, which would have been...inconvenient for the WHO.
Logged in just to reply and say I enjoyed this comment so much I've been randomly laughing over the course of the day just thinking about it again. A+++
"Nu" means nude in Portuguese, French and Catalan, but that's the masculine form, whereas the noun variant is feminine, therefore "nu variant" would never be mistaken for "nude variant". But even if it could be misinterpreted, I don't think anybody would care.
I think they realised that “Nu” was too similar to “New” that if/when the next variant came around, there would be confusion as to what someone means when they speak the words “New variant”
This is a multinational organization, funded by member states, built around consensus that we're talking about here.
It seems unreasonable to expect international organizations to be simultaneously accepted by multiple parties with divergent and conflicting interests... and somehow not be subject to politics.
It’s disturbing how poor the civics knowledge regarding multinational organisations remains in much of the world.
The relations between countries in general are dysfunctional, driven by politics and selfish interests, often corrupt, and dependent on power, why are we surprised when those same factors affect shared multinational organisations?
Granted, but unfortunately some problems (war, global climate, trade baselines) can only be tackled in a multinational forum, because agreement between multiple parties is required for any truly optimal solution.
And the only feasible solutions to creating those forums are points somewhere between "completely political" and "apolitical."
So it's constructive to say "I wish the WHO were less political" or "The WHO should appease its members by doing X, so that it could be more neutral in Y," but it's pretty trite to comment that it's political. Yes, and what alternatives are possible?
Those actions are precisely what one might expect of a multinational organization aiming to build consensus. It sounds like you’re implying some sort of behind-the-scenes loyalties, whereas I would suggest they’re more of a necessary feature given this mission.
> Will people ever get over sensationalism and learn to live it?
You see, that's the crux of the matter: Not everyone can live with it. Literally. So far, it killed more than 5 million people globally. There is also the issue with possibly lasting brain damage (even occuring in cases that weren't severe enough for hospitalization) and life-wrecking long covid. Compassionate people have a problem ignoring all that.
Your calculation needs to take loss in quality of life due to a) contracting long COVID, b) suffering a COVID-induced stroke, or c) living with brain damage post-COVID into account. Furthermore, you should consider that mutations will run rampant if laissez-faire policies are implemented; a variant with increased lethality might come along and cut your life short.
I know 2 young perfectly physically healthy people personally whose mental health deteoriorated to the point that they became suicidal. So forgive me if I take offense at your comment.
That doesn't mean any of these NPI's work, are ethical, or are worth their immense cost to society. It is entirely possible to "take this serious" but feel that society is causing itself far more harm with all these measures than it would have by doing absolutely nothing at all. None of these thing were in any playbook prior to march of 2020. And here we are almost a month from 2022 still working from this unwritten, untested playbook and still we have no clue if any of it works.
About the only thing we know works is vaccines and all these cool treatments we've figured out.
Masks are cheap and simple with no drawbacks. Ventilation is easy in many cases. Keeping one's distance costs nothing (which is not the be-all of social distancing, I agree). Vaccines are free.
These are all ethical, very effective and cost the individual almost nothing.
Enforcing social distancing is complex and incurs costs. For outdoor venues it seems to be less effective. What other methods are causing far more harm than good, far more harm than doing nothing?
> None of these thing were in any playbook prior to march of 2020.
Which things do you think are wild new tactics for trying to contain a pandemic? Social distancing? Lockdowns? Wearing masks in public? Because if you think any of those are untested wacky "nobody's ever tried anything like this before!" approaches, you need to spend a few more minutes with your favorite search engine.
You've been severely misinformed. You can read for example the UK's pre-pandemic playbook at (https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...) - note they specifically call out universal masking, border closures, and restrictions on public gatherings as bad policies they don't plan to implement because there's no good evidence they help. Maybe they were wrong (I definitely think they were wrong on masks!), or maybe the difference between true influenza and a coronavirus with similar symptoms matters, but it's just not accurate to present these kinds of policies as the pre-pandemic consensus.
I think nearly everyone except ardent libertarian ideologues has at least some criticisms of capitalism, yes. But how is that related to the present discussion?
Imagine there was a fire near where you live, constantly spreading and endangering lives in your community. Would you say people can just "learn to live it"?
Imagine being given almost 2 years to build capacity to put that fire out so the community could go back to normal life but instead zero additional capacity was built? Hospitals had almost 2 years to build capacity. Where is it? Why is society being asked to continue bailing out institutions that have had an enormous amount of time to prepare?
You just don't build capacity against something that grows exponentially until it hits a substantial part of the overall population. Say a country like the UK, at the peak of the curve, would have 1% of their population getting sick everyday for a week or two, and 1% of that getting in a hospital (very conservative since 1% is the IFR and lots of people get out of the hospital on their legs)
You might have built the 90.000 beds you need, but where will you find the doctors?
sorry, have I been time travelled back to march 2020? I heard this exact same preposterous extrapolation then. people going mad with fear at the omnipotent power of the exponential function. hundreds of thousands in hospitals all at once, millions of people sick at a time, we were told. I should know, I was one of them. I scribbled some numbers on the back of a fag packet, concluded we were doomed, and started buying tinned food and scrounging N95s from B&Q.
but then it didn't happen, did it? it never fucking happened, anywhere, lockdown or no. I remember a giant emergency field hospital that got built in the middle of london, and it sat there completely fucking bone idle. my initial numbers were wrong, and so were the experts'.
I remember a terrifyingly huge bell curve for hospitalizations assuming no lockdown, with a piddling little horizontal line just above the x-axis representing bed capacity. that apocalypse never happened for sweden or the numerous other places which never locked down. I remember watching the sweden case graph intently around May, smugly predicting a self-inflicted genocide. It never came. Then there was a US state (I forget which one) that ended its lockdown and opened up back to normal. I very confidently predicted a disaster that never arrived.
eventually (much later than I should have) I woke up from the mass hallucination. turns out covid, like other coronaviruses, is strongly seasonal, it waxes and wanes for reasons we don't quite understand. the exponential curve always burns itself out well short of what the hammer-and-dance people said, no matter what we do.
do you expect us to forget all that? do you really think we can be fooled twice? do you honestly think people will sit down and take another wave of lockdowns when we're in the middle of a supply chain and inflation crisis caused by the first one?
Thank you very much for this. You summarize my thoughts exactly. SARS-COV-2 is a real physical virus that can ruin your day. But Covid isn’t the only illness it has seemed to cause. It’s also caused one of the greatest mass hysteria events in human existence. This meme/virus we’ve been passing around for 630 days and counting is as much a illness of the mind as it is something that makes you physically I’ll.
How are you going to find the doctors? It doesn’t take 2 years to train one. Of course you can get them from other countries but here you are just transferring the problem to someone else.
You mean like we learned to live with the far more deadly (at least initially) influenza?
As your body increasingly comes in contact with it you’ll build a solid immunity. Similar to the other mRNA viruses such as RSV (dangerous to babies, but almost no one else).
It took a couple years for the 1918 pandemic to sputter out. We didn't learn to live with it, our immune systems learned to fight it off, and it retreated from being an acutely dangerous threat to being merely a chronic one.
The cost was millions of lives, because it was the only option- there were no vaccines or antivirals. But we have both of those now. The steady-state for COVID-19 will hopefully look something like seasonal flu, but it will take time.
You're off by a factor of 10, it killed 50 million in 1918-1920, 1-4 million in 1957-1958, 1-4 million again in 1968-1969, 700k in 1977, 100-200k in 2009.
When far more people are harmed by the indirect effects of the fire (fear, jobs lost, mental health issues etc) than the fire itself, then yes - I would encourage them to liberate their minds, embrace reality and start living.
A heck of a lot of people really don't want to move on from all this. Life is way too short to be wasted living the way some of society seems to think is necessary "in order to take this serious".
Disease and death have been a part of humanity since time began. All we can do is try to make the most out of the short time we have here on this earth. Playing this covid theater game for 2+ years is, in my opinion, an insulting to human nature. We aren't meant to do this.
You can still take vaccines, wear masks, and practice distancing. At some point your well-being becomes solely your responsbility, not everyone else's. We can debate on where that point lies. Just because your fear of COVID is the trendiest political cause doesn't necessarily mean other people's quality of lives don't matter. Life is about trade-off, not about virtue-signalling.
It’s perfectly reasonable to think X people dying is worth it to avoid Y people’s quality of life being reduced by Z, depending on the values of X, Y, and Z.
Everyone behaves as if this is true every single day, regardless of how mad they get when it’s stated explicitly.
> It’s perfectly reasonable to think X people dying is worth it to avoid Y people’s quality of life being reduced by Z, depending on the values of X, Y, and Z.
not if I'm part of the X group, for purely selfish reasons, and it's perfectly rational for anyone to not want to be in the X group, no matter what values assigned to Y and Z are.
So the crux of the problem isn't what you stated - it's that these decisions are made, and some people disagree, because either they are in the X group, or not. This is why conscription is required in a war, and this is why lockdowns are needed in a pandemic, etc.
“It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation. War is hell.”
literally yes. in the words of my corrupt and buffoonish prime minister: let the bodies pile high. the wisest thing he ever said, even though he won't admit to it.
(and really the piles won't be that high. they'll be of low-to-medium height, consisting mostly of the old and fat.)
The grim reality is that there hasn't been a single policy that's been shown to have made any difference at all. NONE. There's literally nothing to do other than stay home if sick and get vaxxed if you want, the rest is all theater and much of it has horrible tradeoffs.
>The grim reality is that there hasn't been a single policy that's been shown to have made any difference at all. NONE.
BULLSHIT.
How delusional can you be? There is plenty of evidence that masks and contact reduction in various forms have a massive effect on how quickly the virus spreads. Infection numbers and their development over time varied wildly between countries, clearly correlated with such measures, long before vaccines were available.
The comment you responded to asked for an honest, intellectual response but your response was reactionary, rude, and provided no insight.
The links you supplied in your other comment do not show a clear causal effect of mandates and restrictions on case rates. Outbreaks are known to follow a pretty clear 45 day cycle; the onset of restrictions usually occur as rates are exponentially increasing and theres no evidence that such restrictions taper infections to a degree discernible from the normal cycle.
Furthermore, observational evidence from states like Florida, a state that has zero restrictions or mandates and yet currently has the lowest case rate in the United States, make the idea that such measures have a “massive effect” on spread dubious at best.
> The links you supplied in your other comment do not show a clear causal effect of mandates and restrictions on case rates.
They do. It's not mathematically-clean, but that is just not what you get in a messy reality.
>Outbreaks are known to follow a pretty clear 45 day cycle; the onset of restrictions usually occur as rates are exponentially increasing and theres no evidence that such restrictions taper infections to a degree discernible from the normal cycle.
What is the mechanism behind this cycle that you claim? How do you conclude that it's not the typical beaurocratic reaction time to rising case numbers and implementation of restrictions that cause the cycle?
We know how the virus spreads. How contact reduction and masks prevent that is simple enough for a preschooler to understand. We have strong empirical evidence that it works at scale. Claiming anything else is simply reality denial.
>Furthermore, observational evidence from states like Florida, a state that has zero restrictions or mandates and yet currently has the lowest case rate in the United States, make the idea that such measures have a “massive effect” on spread dubious at best.
How so? How can development in a state that has no restrictions prove anything at all about how effective they are?
At most, the example can prove that there are other things that can reduce case numbers. I never said there weren't. Now go and tell me what they are, how they work, and how they can be transferred elsewhere. Because if the answer turns out to be "warm climate" that is not very useful.
It's totally worth looking at. But not as a diversion to avoid doing things we know to work at preventing hundreds of deaths every day.
> There is plenty of evidence that masks and contact reduction in various forms have a massive effect on how quickly the virus spreads.
If this is true, why is it when showing a chart of data it is almost impossible to pick when any of these measures went into effect? If these measures worked to any worthwhile degree their effect on any data should be absolutely profound. Thus far, you'd have a hard time picking florida out from oregon or california. If you need PhD level math to prove that all these NPI'S work... it means they weren't worth the extremely toxic and corrosive effectives they've had on our communities. Any fool off the street should be able to look at the raw data and see the impact, which currently you can't do.
Doesn't take "PhD level math" either, just some basic understanding how the effects are delayed by incubation period, testing and reporting, and how an exponential function changes shape as the exponent changes
It's not nearly as straightforward as you're pointing out because people voluntarily change their behaviour in response to circumstances, like case numbers, deaths, etc. Your big assumption is that top-down policies/controls are the biggest factor causing delayed change in numbers, but that isn't at all clear from the data alone.
amazing how in many places the cases start dropping the instant the lockdown comes into place, or sometimes even slightly before, rather than ~10 days afterwards as would be expected from the incubation period. can the virus hear us?
Incubation period varies, and is probably best modelled as a Gaussian function.
Some cases will incubate nearly right away, and others will take more than the 2-3 weeks that are often used as quarantine periods. Getting to the 95th or 99th percentile is not the same thing as getting to the 100th percentile.
This is one of the reasons that a covid-zero strategy is effectively unimplementable.
I have done that in another reply before your comment, and the data is in fact very clear and obvious, your silly denial nonwithstanding.
Let's turn the tables: if you claim that contact reduction measures and mask mandates don't work, show me the evidence. Show me a place where they were implemented, and there was no effect on case numbers after 2 to 4 weeks. Go. I'm waiting.
Simply because your country's leadership is incompetent and you are incompetent at finding opposing views and analysis doesn't mean that said tools don't exist
Apologies for writing such a scathing comment but, guys, we are 1 year plus into this, please just... I don't even know, I'd like to say "inform yourselves" but with the web and informational intakes being so fragmented who knows what you guys even consider "good information" anymore
Like the common cold or the flu, odds are the coronavirus will be with us forever in some form or another. It is unrealistic to create a vaccine for every variant. We should learn how to treat, and allow natural immunity to take over. Take the 0.07% (correction) chance of death.
The case => death rate is much higher worldwide (https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality). Even if you assume that every human on the face of the planet has had COVID and the death counts are perfectly accurate you arrive at a rate of 5.5M dead / 7.8B cases = 0.07%, ten times the rate you stated. But of course not every human has contracted COVID, largely thanks to people taking preventative measures like social distancing, mask wearing and vaccination. The path you suggest would likely lead to the preventable death of many million more people.
> The path you suggest would likely lead to the preventable death of many million more people.
people who suggest that we should "let natural immunity work" are implicitly imagining that they themselves are going to be OK, and would rather have their freedom and activities restored at the cost of lives. Other people dying is "a sacrifice i'm willing to make".
It's very reasonable to give people yearly updated shots. There are big overlaps in the variants so we wouldn't need one for each variant, not to mention you could combine multiple variants in one shot.
Also, your case mortality rate number seems wrong, by orders of magnitude.
Isn't updating the vaccine on a yearly basis something that's already being done for the flu vaccines?
> because flu viruses are constantly changing, the composition of flu vaccines is reviewed annually, and vaccines are updated to protect against the viruses that research indicates will be most common during the upcoming flu season.
Also add to that discrepancies between excess deaths and covid death numbers in places like India, which appears to have a difference of about 7-10x the official covid death count
10,000,000 times 50,000,000,000 (rough stab at # of virions per infection, range 1 to 100 B), is
500,000,000,000,000,000 opportunities for mutations so far.
You can take it to the bank that the number of mutations is far, far higher than the number that makes it to the press because the strains that end up dominating have already undergone a lot of competitive pressure by the time we notice them, so there will be a lot more strains that we will simply never know about.
Fun fact: the total mass of all virions produced by infected hosts to date is likely less than 10 kg.
One thing to be aware of with RNA viruses - they mutate all the time and almost all mutations are nonviable (unable to infect cells or unable to replicate) and die off immediately. The fact there are so few variants (and there hasn't been a new dominant variant since October 2020 ) illustrates how fragile its mechanisms are.
The number of viable versions must number in the thousands though, they are just less viable than the previous generation and that's why they'll die out almost immediately, for a new strain to become the dominant one it has to work 'better' than the old one.
A lot of speculation still, but it's not all bad so far.