Care to tell us something about it instead of just linking to a strange video? What exactly is an “EAS scenario”? Who made this video, what is it about?
By far the most important aspect of this new mutation is whether it might be resistant to the currently developed vaccines. This is just being studied now but from everything I’ve seen the answer is almost certainly “no” – i.e.- the current vaccines will be effective against all known strains of COVID.
One thing perhaps not stressed enough is the speed at which this has been identified and acted on. Tracking the various mutuations (there are loads) and identifying any problematic ones is something that the UK is particulalrly good at.
As scary as it sounds this is probably the fastest we could have reasonably tracked it down and begun to act.
However, I suspect the new variant isalready spreading through the country and into Europe, I don’t see how it cannot. (it is already in South Africa). So expect more serious contact restrictions in more countries.
The general impression I get from the experts is that vaccines should still work and that a major shift in mortality rates are unlikely…hopefully.
Unlikely to to remain in the UK. That would require complete 100%, no mistakes, no excepts, never ever movement. And That’s just impossible.
There were 10,000 cases a day, 50% were the new strain, so that’s probably 100,000 new-strain cases floating around for a couple of weeks. - in Kent, which is right next to France!
It is abroad by now.
The strain in South Africa has the N501Y mutation, but it is not the same lineage. In other words, UK strain (which has many other mutations also) is not the source of the South African one. One case of the UK strain has been identified in the Netherlands.
New Science article here:
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/12/mutant-coronavirus-united-kingdom-sets-alarms-its-importance-remains-unclear
It looks like the early data are fairly good that we have strains emerging that are more infectious. But no reliable data yet indicating that these strains can evade the vaccine or cause more serious disease.
Ah, the last I heard a few days ago it was thought that the SA version was the same. The latest updates suggest not.
Though the UK strain has been detected elsewhere already (and I’m sure it will prove to be widespread)
The TV here had a virologist on saying that if she had to guess the mutation would have at least some effect on the efficacy of the vaccines. Since the mutation appears to be in the spike of the virus and that’s most of the vaccine candidates target.
She said the most likely of the “bad scenarios” is not that this mutation will cause all vaccines to fail, it’s that the vaccine duration of protection will be reduced and chance that a more vaccine resistant mutation will arrive in the future increase.
So maybe it’s curtains for our hope of eradicating this thing?
To be fair, that was never going to happen.
Encouraging view from Iceland:
Translated excerpts:
"We are of the opinion that there is nothing in this British strain that is more contagious than what we saw in this ‘blue virus’ this summer. There is nothing dramatic about this strain and if it is somewhat more contagious, this is a very minimal difference, "says Kári Stefánsson, CEO of deCODE Genetics, about the so-called British strain. The company monitors all sequencing data added to databases.
Þórólfur Guðnason, the Chief Epidemiologist, told the news agency today that he was not sure why the British thought that this was linked to the virus itself and that it was more contagious. “It may well be, but it is not clear what it is based on. It may well be that this is related to people’s behaviour, that they are gathering and not being careful. That is the key to transmission.”
Kári Stefánsson, CEO of deCODE Genetics, says in an interview with the news agency that the Chief Epidemiologist had contacted the company that monitors all the virus sequencing entered into databases. “We are of the opinion that there is nothing in this strain that is beyond what we saw in the so-called blue virus.”
Kári therefore sees no reason to take similar action as other countries have done today and he suspects that the British government and the World Health Organization are using this virus mutation to encourage people and other countries to be careful at Christmas. “We do not have to worry about this strain and we should not ban people from flying from the UK or other countries.”
I don’t know how much can really be cleaned from a translation, but at face value this is very naive statement. Neither Stefánsson not the U.K. epidemiologists are idiots, so if he disagrees with the modeling by the U.K. epidemiologists it cannot be for a such a simplistic reason. They are obviously looking at relative abundance of this strain, and their model incorporates the possibility of overall variation in behavior. He may well have valid reasons to think that their modeling is wrong or that the statistical power is not there to draw their conclusions, but it’s not as though it never occurred to them that behavioral variation is a potential confounding variable.
I sure hope so. Seems like a ridiculous consideration to miss in a model. Clarification on his disagreement would be enlightening.
Good news from Germany:
Berlin, Germany:
European Union experts believe existing vaccines against coronavirus are effective against the new fast-spreading strain identified in Britain, Germany’s health minister said Sunday.
“According to everything we know so far” the new strain “has no impact on the vaccines”, which remain “just as effective”, Jens Spahn told public broadcaster ZDF, citing “talks among experts of European authorities”.
Spahn was referring especially to the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, which is already being administered in countries including the US and UK and which is on the brink of receiving approval from the European Medicines Agency.
Viruses do not mutate on their own, they mutate in people. Therefore the more people who have a given virus, the greater the odds of a mutation occurring. A darned good reason to limit the spread as much as possible. In other words, the exact opposite of a herd immunity “strategy”.
This again seems like kind of a useless statement. The fact is we have absolute no data whatsoever on how this strain responds to the vaccines.
What we know a priori is:
(a) it’s extremely difficult for any new strain to evade the vaccines completely, because the spike protein has to change shape enough to evade all clones in a likely polyclonal humoral response, while still retaining affinity for the cell surface receptor; and it must evade cell-mediated immunity, which is even more difficult because of genetic diversity in the immune system among humans.
(b) almost nobody has been vaccinated yet, so there’s certainly no significant natural selection yet for strains that can evade;
but
(c) if any strain does emerge that can evade the vaccines to a significant degree, it will have multiple mutations on spike - which this one does.
With absolutely no data whatsoever, you can equally well focus on (a) or (b) or (c) depending on whether you want to reassure people or scare them.
Thanks for the explanation.
Can any insights be derived by studying people that have already been naturally infected? Obviously, if we started seeing previously infected people becoming reinfected with this new strain on a large scale, that would be a Very Bad Thing and probably have implications for the vaccines.
Given ( c ), it’s very wrongheaded to choose NOT to take aggressive precautions until it’s proven that the strain is more dangerous (more transmissible, more harmful, or vaccine resistant). Given the extent of the mutation of the spike protein, it should be treated as more dangerous until proven otherwise in term of precautions. Greater lockdown requirements and travel restrictions absolutely make sense.
Also, even if it does not cause more severe illness, if it is much more transmissible, it will cause many more deaths in places that already have overwhelmed hospitals. If there’s already no more capacity, and the virus suddenly becomes 50 or 70% more transmissible, things will get much much worse.
Yes, I think for sure that would be a Very Bad Thing, and by change the existing PCR test can distinguish the new variant, so I’m sure they are already on the lookout for this. But there’s so much natural variation in strength, duration and character of immune response, we should overreact if isolated cases of reinfection turn up.
They will also be doing in vitro experiments looking at the affinity of neutralizing antibodies for the new strain relative to the old strains.
I hope typo - shouldn’t?
Sounds like we just need more time before anyone can say much about this variant.
Yes. Please don’t just toss out a YouTube link and expect us to watch it in order to figure out why you are linking it.
And for me it is very hard to guess what random acronyms mean. Just write it out please.
Do we know if mutations have random effects, or if they tend in a certain direction, for example becoming less deadly as they do?
Generally speaking pathogens have evolutionary pressure to become more contagious and less deadly over the long term. This is why we don’t know the cause of some ancient diseases such as the Plauge of Athens and the English Sweating sickness since it’s that those particular pathogens no longer cause illnesses. It’s also why before the ancient time of February 2020, we used the example that flu used to be a deadly disease to illustrate just how our immune systems have adapted.
But over the short term, a disease can absolutely become more deadly, the Spanish flu did, worryingly about the same stage in the pandemic.