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Heavily mutated coronavirus variant puts scientists on alert (nature.com)
350 points by abbassi on Nov 25, 2021 | hide | past | favorite | 419 comments



It's so interesting watching this get picked up by the news.

Many aren't aware but interestingly these variants are identified and designated in the open on GitHub, here is the GitHub issue for this B.1.1.529 designation https://github.com/cov-lineages/pango-designation/issues/343. I've recently started watching this repo as it's quite interesting reading about the different variants popping up across the world.


That’s not quite accurate, they’re identified in GISAID [0] and other platforms, which is where scientists upload sampled genetic sequences. It’s also out in the open and free to access.

This GitHub repo is just about registering the Pango lineage, based on data already collected and published at other locations.

[0] https://www.gisaid.org/


I thought the visualization provided by NextStrain was fairly fascinating, not to mention it is used by the CDC an other organizations:

https://nextstrain.org/ncov/gisaid/global


How to read that branch diagram?


just click on the json link below it?


Wow that's wild would not have thought of that being on GitHub ha


GitHub is being used by many governmental agencies as a repository for information, especially numeric and usable for automation (not just for code). Another contextual example is "how many contagions per district, daily", but you could also have "how many herons observed in that territory", etc.


Whenever you hear news about mutated COVID and how fast it spreads there are a few important things to remember.

1. Viruses are constantly mutating, its kind of their thing.

2. Most mutations do absolutely nothing or are actually harmful to the virus.

3. When a new mutation is noted to be spreading fast its usually because of the nature of super spreader events and not because the new mutation is more or less transmissible.

4. Scientist and health officials should absolutely be keeping an eye on these things.

[0] Vincent Racaniello - SARS-CoV-2 UK variant: Does it matter https://youtu.be/wC8ObD2W4Rk


But Vince from YouTube was of course completely wrong there. At the time they recorded that video, there was overwhelming evidence that the Alpha variant was more transmissive. It was astronomically unlikely that it could have been explained by a founder effect or individual super-spreader events. Unsurprisingly, the evidence was correct while the uninformed pattern-matching from a non-epidemiologist was wrong.

For this new variant it could still plausibly be a founder effect. But that's because the circumstances are different this time (the variant became dominant while cases were surging from almost nothing, not when the cases were already at a high level). Not because that checklist is actually correct.


> But Vince from YouTube was of course completely wrong there.

Claiming Vince was wrong in the video also means the researchers that discovered the variant were wrong. After all he was just parroting their findings in the video.


This article was on the same day as your YouTube video and paints a very different picture. So what's your source that the YouTuber has accurately parroted scientific findings?

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/dec/21/calls-for-n...


Vincent Racaniello is a professor of virology.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincent_Racaniello


17 minutes in, dismissing the R value that the UK scientific advisors calculated based on unpublished data, that we now know was correct: "you can't use epidemiological data to prove a biological effect of an amino acid..."

Yeah, that's a virology point of view all right. That something has to have a proven biological mechanism before it can be taken as fact, or even considered as a risk. That's bad public policy though. With his reasoning there would have been no reason to increase restrictions in the UK in Dec/Jan, but in fact the restrictions were extremely necessary and the variant caused tens of thousands of extra deaths.


The R numbers coming out of UK epidemiology are garbage, Racaniello is right about that. They aren't physically grounded in any way, they're just arbitrary fudge factors brute forced to make their equations plot graphs that look like reported government stats so far. The same model will routinely calculate totally different values of R for different areas of the same country at the same time, without variants or anything like that.

Also the claims about variants being "more infectious" are - when you dig in - hopelessly confounded by seasonal effects that many epidemiological papers were at that time still ignoring.


The seasonal effects are trivially controlled for by comparing the growth rate of the variant to the growth rate of the wildtype at the same time. And that's exactly how the original analysis was done, because the people doing it were not incompetent.

For your seasonal effect explanation to make any sense, the effect would have to have only applied to Alpha but not to baseline Covid at the same time. And then it's not a seasonal effect, is it? It's an actual difference in the behavior of the two variants. The same goes for any other similar confounder that you try to manufacture.


Not the analysis I saw, where Delta's growth rate was compared to Alpha in the same time window, not the start of alpha's own growth period. Because yes, they are totally incompetent. You can look at graphs of the changing proportions to see visually that that's not much difference in how fast they took over.


Professors can be wrong or misunderstand things. They are human too.

Is there any evidence besides an appeal to authority?


An expert in the field is more likely to be right compared to someone who isn't an expert. Their opinion should carry greater weight


The modern issue is that most of experts are with very narrow expertise, which is not carrying that great weight as you might think and such expertise also doesn't mean that much in responsibilities.

My mother at 14 after a car accident was considered as lost cause and by opinion of expert she should be dead, but survived only because her relative with much less medical expertise believed in second opinion and got her in different hospital. Sometimes, these stupid parroted ideas about expert opinions can only be proven wrong by personal experience only. But quite many people do not learn from their own mistakes, so, meh - there is no cure for stupid people, who can't think by themselves.

PS Every covid mutation so far has put scientists on alert...


If a thousand people point to expert A, and a single person points to expert B, does that tell us anything useful about expert A or B?


expert A has thousands of twitter followers, while expert B does not use social media.


Only if they have a good record of predictive accuracy.

Is that the case here?


Are you claiming a professor of virology shouldn't be classed as an expert in viruses?


They are only allowed to be an an expert in 2021 if a majority of anonymous Twitter followers agree with their assessment, and if their stated political opinions for their entire lives lean in the correct direction. Please note those two conditions correlate.


Not saying this is you. Normally your comment is a trope by the right to paradoxically imply how they are such victims in 2021, but the other side are snowflakes and want to cancel every one.

There’s an overlap with hard left and a few other niche political views as well. Though with less victimhood and more consistency at times.

Personally, I care very little for appeal to authority myself. The bias among experts based on their political views is generally going to be very high.


Vince kind of lost his credibility when he allowed David Tuller to post on his blog.


So Vincent wasn't wrong, because he was just parroting the experts.. but Vincent is the expert? Am I understanding the logic correctly?


No you're not understanding the logic correctly. The GP was wondering why he has to trust a YouTuber to accurately parrot a research article and I point out that he's not a random YouTuber. Of course he can still be wrong?


Appeal to authority is a logical fallacy, no? Because that's exactly what the claim is. I understand that it makes him less likely to misunderstand the research (probably) but its not a guarantee and is naive to depend on that fact.


Appeal to authority is not a logical fallacy, although some people argue that it is. Put more correctly: experts know better, but aren't perfect. For example, were I to cite Peter Duesberg, a well known virologist, about HIV transmission, I'd be wrong, even though he's an expert virologist.

I assign higher priors to subject matter experts until I have reason to believe otherwise.


> Appeal to authority is not a logical fallacy, although some people argue that it is.

I mean, it is a logical fallacy. An expert isn't right only because he's an expert, he's right only when the evidence supports his position. Do all experts only make conclusions based on evidence, or do other beliefs factor in? I think the answer is clear, hence the fallacy.


No, it's not a logical fallacy. Nor would the fact that experts don't make conclusions purely on evidence mean their citing their statements fallacious.

For any given scientific question, select two populations. One populaton is enriched in subject matter experts, while the other is selected at random. Have them make blind predictions about scientific facts. It is not fallacious to sdtate that the first group's predictions will have a higher posterior probability.


I've actually studied a lot about logical fallacies, and so I can tell you with certainty that appeal to authority is, indeed, a logical fallacy.

Source: Myself, an authority

Joking aside, you are just misrepresenting what the "appeal to authority" logical fallacy is. An "appeal to authority" is when one argues that "X is correct because <insert some expert> said it was". In really, X is either correct or incorrect, regardless of what any authority has said about it.

So yes, appeal to authority is absolutely a logical fallacy. Changing the definition of those words and then arguing that your definition isn't a fallacy is called a fallacy of equivocation. And yes, a fallacy of equivocation is also a logical fallacy.


What's really going on here is two different meanings of the word "argument". Appeal to authority is indeed a fallacy if you're dealing with a logical argument meant to prove something absolutely and undeniably true.

That's not the only kind of argument that exists though, and we're pretty unlikely to be in that kind of argument on the internet talking about current events. When trying to tell from incomplete facts what's more likely to be true, listening to what an expert says is a pretty good start.


I agree with everything you said. But I still say that “appeal to authority is not a logical fallacy” is a false statement, regardless of whatever shinanigans is going on in this discussion.


Agreed. It's always a true statement, though sometimes irrelevant.


you can't provide anything absolutely and undeniably true, except maybe in math. I mean, I used to do debate and after some time I noticed that none of it was based on truly logical arguments; everything was about persuasive seduction and coming up with the minimum to cast doubt on your opponent's position.

But yeah, I like the way you put this; we're just arguing on the internet about things which are too messy to have a true false dichotomy.


> you can't provide anything absolutely and undeniably true, except maybe in math

Logic is part of math, and logic is where logical fallacies come from.


You really need to look up what "logic fallacy" means. Any invalid logical inference is a fallacy. An appeal to authority is not a valid logical inference because an authority's claim is not necessarily true; the definition of a valid inference rule is if it's result is necessarily true if it's antecedents are true. Therefore an appeal to authority is a logical fallacy, by definition.


Appeal to probability is also another kind of logical fallacy. Don't get me wrong, there's value on knowledge and judgement that resides outside of the logic domain but you don't know what's a logical fallacy.


What does the logic domain have to contribute to human arguments? There is nothing, other than pure math, which follows logic. Nothing in our society is logical in a way that people arguing objective facts could resolve a problem.


A lot. It's the language of pure reason and a tool for abstract thought. It's a pillar of any STEM field like math, computers, physics, engineering, etc. Our society was built on top of it. I think you're misjudging it's value because you're mistaking it for a way to achieve non-falsifiable claims, which it's not as any logical claim only hold as much as it's premises, while ignoring it's value as a framework for though.


Where is the appeal to authority? I made no such claim and have explained what I meant in considerable detail? I have explicitly mentioned several times that he can be wrong. Appeal to authority means authority isn't wrong because authority.


lozenge stated: "So what's your source that the YouTuber has accurately parroted scientific findings?"

To which you replied: "Vincent Racaniello is a professor of virology.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincent_Racaniello"

This is an appeal to the authority of Vincent's position as a professor


On its own you can interpret it like that, but this is a bit unfair. I have already explained what I meant with my comment, I even have a comment that predates the one you cite where I explicitly claim that he can be wrong... My point was not to say that he's right because he's a professor. It was to clarify that he's not a random YouTuber.


It seems silly, to me at least, to take external statements to this given thread and apply them as if they were said here. I took your comment at face value, all seven words and the URL. That was the entire statement, there was no mention of "he's an expert but he could be wrong"

When asked for evidence, the ONLY evidence that you provided, was that he IS an expert. Full stop.


At the time the message tree was vastly different. The messages were next to each other. It looked like this:

             GP
             /\
      Comment.  My 2nd reply with link.
        /
My first reply where I said he could be wrong.


> So what's your source that the YouTuber has accurately parroted scientific findings?

The parts of the video where he literally quotes the original findings.


And then dismisses their findings as "that's a flawed argument and not how we do science" (17 minutes in).


Why does it matter? Researchers are wrong all the time, improving upon that is kind of the point of science.

It's a bit unfair that the GP calls him Vince from Youtube. He's a professor of virology so not just some nobody giving his opinion on Youtube. This doesn't mean he can't be wrong of course.


I did feel a bit bad writing it, but it was for the purpose of countering the appeal to authority. This is a epidemiological question, and being a professor of virology doesn't make you an expert at that. So the outcome was that Racaniello ended up recommending inaction, since he'd only accept evidence from his own field (i.e. lab work).


Thanks dude, now I have to deal with lots of replies that misunderstand what I wrote in response to you. While you knew who he was! :P

But all good. I used to listen to his podcast at the beginning of the crisis but after a while I stopped because I felt they were ignoring reality while waiting for science. Which felt like a strange way of working when reality was what we had to base decisions off of.


I think it matters that he’s wrong because you’ve already given him such a high stature. Him being wrong means a policy that depends on him being right should also be reinspected. But policies aren’t that flexible.


> Why does it matter?

because the science matters. This new SA variant could be more transmissible or it could not be. Lets stick to the actual data and go from there.


The question is: what do you do in the absence of data, or with only very preliminary data? By the time the scientists have had chance to fully investigate the moment for action has often passed.


'... what do you do in the absence of data, or with only very preliminary data?'

Stop shoveling carbs at every meal. Lose 30 pounds. Start to exercise and increase cardio-pulmonary performance. It appears most people in developed countries became couch potatoes and gained fat. To each his own. My body, my choice. Your body, your choice.


One day this totally common sense comment will be the norm.


Probably the same thing as if a new variant didn't exist. Get vaccinated, wear mask, etc.


I think we are misunderstanding each other. I asked why it matters if Vincent being wrong means that the scientists that wrote the article would be wrong. To me it is a natural thing that happens in science. Of course the scientists can be wrong?


because I was getting the impression the person I replied to was trying to frame the situation as a YouTuber vs Scientist argument. That of course wasn't the reality.


But the actual commonsense evidence is that Alpha isn't more transmissive, which makes Vincent right. Alpha, Delta, and every other variant has turned out to be the same when practically speaking as experienced in our actual cities and populations across the world. So Vincent is ultimately correct: the "evidence" based on modeling was lacking, and his second point was that politicians and the media should not be rhetorically distorting the scientific positions that can be taken. There's a difference between taking reasonable precautions and oversimplifying scientific positions in order to "motivate" the public or to make media hype (both of which are TWiV's pet peeve, as anyone who has been watching their videos can see).


Absolutely False.

https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/5-things-to-know-delta-var...

Delta’s quick growth rate has been especially dramatic, says F. Perry Wilson, MD, a Yale Medicine epidemiologist. Delta was spreading 50% faster than Alpha, which was 50% more contagious than the original strain of SARS-CoV-2, he says. “In a completely unmitigated environment—where no one is vaccinated or wearing masks—it’s estimated that the average person infected with the original coronavirus strain will infect 2.5 other people,” Dr. Wilson says. “In the same environment, Delta would spread from one person to maybe 3.5 or 4 other people.”

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34369565/

“ We found a mean R0 of 5.08, which is much higher than the R0 of the ancestral strain of 2.79.”

Please stop spreading misinformation.


> Alpha, Delta, and every other variant has turned out to be the same when practically speaking as experienced in our actual cities and populations across the world.

This claim is wildly false, and you've already been refuted by someone else.

Remove your false post.


> 3. When a new mutation is noted to be spreading fast its usually because of the nature of super spreader events and not because the new mutation is more or less transmissible.

Mostly true but in some very major cases it was because the variant did spread faster in general. Such as Delta and the British variant before hand.


Yeah by the time fast spreading variants get picked up by the press, they usually are indeed more transmissible, rather than merely founder effects / super spreader events. We've seen this time and time again to the point that the rational evaluation is to assume the new variant is indeed more transmissible. Especially for this variant which is overtaking Delta so quickly that it can't really be explained by super spreader events.


If such a variant was not spreading faster, how would it ever become a dominant new strain? Just because of some unlucky incident on the other side of the world?


I think the initial fast spread can be incidental, a super spreader event. But if it has lasting ability to displace other variants, especially across multiple countries, then it is likely just easier to spread.

Basically superspreader events can artificially boost a variant for a bit -- it is basically noise. You need to look at a longer time frame to be sure.


Viruses sure fail fast, truly fascinating. Tirelessly mutating to spread and (I assume) survive. Do they serve as purely a "cleaning" function of nature, restoring balance... or do they seek global domination... even if it means destroying the host organisms they depend upon? Are they simply mindless, unintelligent organic micro programs or do they have some kind of plan?


They’re the paperclip maximizers of the animal kingdom. All a virus does is make more of itself. If it does, there’s more, if not, it goes extinct. They do it sloppy and mutate. If it does the thing better, there’s more of the new thing. If not, that new thing goes extinct. Once that’s been happening for billions of years some parts of these viruses will look pretty clever.


Isn’t the difference with AI that viruses don’t have a “final goal” baked into them?

I think the process that you’re describing is the process of genetically evolving-by-mutation life forms in general. So not specific to viruses.

Human bodies are the vehicles for our genes to survive and reproduce :-)


"Goal" kinda invokes intentionality, which can't exist at the size viruses are. (Of course it's an open question whether it exists at all but let's leave that aside.)

Viruses don't have goals. If a virus successfully makes more virus, then there is more of the virus. For viruses that don't do that, there are less of them. That's all there is to it.

It so happens that making more virus often requires resources that were previously in use by other organisms. But that's incidental, not by design.

You only see viruses that are good at making more virus because the other ones died out.


It may be very unlikely, but claiming intention is not possible given virus size feels a little short sighted. Simply because we as humans don't know why or how doesn't mean it's not possible.


Is any of that different to other biological organisms except the mutation rate?


Mutation rate and, relatedly, short generations and huge numbers of copies.


Viruses are what viruses do, they don't have any of these properties that you could assign to them, they just do their thing (replicating using some combination of mechanisms provided by other organisms), and if they do it well they get to do it some more. There are no motivations, there is no plan, there is no function and they don't seek anything.

If they're too successful at what they do their host dies before they can be passed on, if they're not successful enough then the infection wave loses momentum and dies out. Effectively we have been helping them for the last year and a half do do this, without our help this particular virus would die out within a couple of weeks. It needs us for transportation and to be brought in contact with new viable hosts. On its own it can't do much of anything.


From what we know, there's no "plan" or designed function for viruses. They're just crafty pieces of information that get copied and spread in living organisms and sometimes wreak havoc on the hosts.


Like humans? :)


As I understand evolution: life has no plan, goal, aim or intention. It’s endless amounts of parallel and random experimentation over billions of years. And this has led to biological structures that have certain tendencies that work well: cells, reproduction, energy consumption, sexual reproduction. On top of that life has evolved to have behaviour and other attributes that work in certain context: immune systems, locomotion, fur, gills, adaptability, use of tools, creative problem solving.


viruses are a natural outcome of a complex information system and a rich energy economy. Don't ascribe "intent" or "meaning" to them.


I would say they have meaning in a different sense - not as a message but their origin as proof. They are fundamentally proof of the "tautological mechanism" of evolution. It isn't a matter of life but that things which can survive over time and are produced over time will have a higher number existing at once than ones which perish and are not produced. This holds regardless of the how and why.

Native copper ore got largely picked up and used by humans rendering such deposits "extinct" from early civilizations and lead to the practice of mining after the low hanging fruit was used up.


Dekhn is correct in ascribing this to complex information systems though, it is the storage, copying, transmission and expression of DNA that gives viruses their opportunity. All of these mechanisms can be hijacked.


Luckily for us, if they kill their host, they will not spread effectively.


Not necessarily, if they kill their host after a couple of weeks they will spread very effectively indeed, the longer the asymptomatic spread period the better for a virus' chances of moving on to a fresh host undetected. During symptomatic spreading there is at least a warning that someone might be contagious so this is a harder way to spread. And for some viruses it is even possible to spread after the host has died. What happens to the host itself after the virus has spread doesn't really matter. If a host dies before spreading and the virus can't be spread from the corpse then that will work against the virus.


Its know that most viruses trend towards increased transmissibility and decreased lethality.

Killing your host is an awful strategy for continued existence if you don't have your own lipid bilayer.


I am not a virologist but it sounds to me that this is an observation and not a law/axiom.

The virus does not decide a strategy, it is random mutation and selection and even if it is less likely it might be that we could have a variant that is super transmissible and super deadly. This effect could be obtain in the delay between transmission and visible effects on human body. Example: virus is transmissible with N days before we can see signs of infection.

Of course we can fight back by testing everyone weekly even if they show no signs.


Mutations which improve transmission and longetivity will, in general, become more prevalent. Proliferation begets proliferation. You cannot transmit a strain if you are at home in bed from its severity.

Help me understand how a virus can replicate without being detected but can also increase its lethality.

We already have an asymptomatic and infectious incubation period. If that kept stretching longer then you are delaying the lytic cycle even longer? Or does propogation and ultimately viral load also happen as a slower burn? Eventually you will have damaged too many cells.


I said “visible effects” which is different than detecting a virus in human body. That mean pre-symptomatic transmission.

I am not up to date with latest research but it seemed to be that SARS-CoV-2 is a virus that can be transmitted before symptoms onset.

Regarding replication without being detected but also increased lethality this you might be right that doing the math maybe the hypothesis I present seems far fetched.

Still I guess that a slight bump in mortality will create a lot of deaths due to its transmission.

Of course like I said I am just expressing an opinion that might be very wrong.


This is false.

No virus has ever done this.


Wasn’t there also some kind of watchlist where they track up to 7000 mutations in a given timeframe? Probably just minor mutations, but still.


Does the flu virus mutate every year?


I'm not sure if you are trolling, or sincere, but yes:

https://www.uabmedicine.org/-/flu-strains-explained-and-how-...

This is why Flu shots are seasonal


I'm wondering why we don't start producing mRNA vaccines targeting this other variant now. Seems like there could be some safety and efficacy protocol put in place to target emerging variants so we don't have to start from scratch in the approval process, requiring 30k-40k adults alone every year.


>I'm wondering why we don't start producing mRNA vaccines targeting this other variant now.

People are developing mRNA vaccines for 'flu now. Moderna, Pfizer and Sanofi all have mRNA 'flu vaccines in clinical trials, and there are a bunch more in the pre-clinical stages.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41573-021-00176-7


why the apostrophes?


Flu is short for influenza so perhaps the apostrophes are intended to indicate the existence of missing characters?


Ah yes, but that would be " 'Flu' " would it not?


I'd say that's a good rhetorical question rather than a troll.

It's designed to make a statement, rather than elicit information. (Ref Oxford Languages).


Yeah, that’s why people take a shot every year.


Also why many people don't take it at all. Not worth the constant hassle for something that doesn't bother me in the first place. Flu shot efficacy is usually in the gutter anyway (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza_vaccine#Effectivenes...).


It doesn't bother you yet. Wait until you are say sixty or seventy years old. I am of course making a few assumptions here 8) Flu rarely kills young 'uns in reasonable to good shape with no other indicators or whatever doctors call it. I mean risks associated with a particular individual.

The point of vaccines is not perfection but more like a war of attrition. A vaccine has several potential purposes, some of them are these:

  * Reduce the possibility of infection
  * Reduce the effects of an infection 
  * Reduce the infectiousness of an individual to other people
The first two effects affect you personally and the third one affects society as a whole. The third one is the thing behind the "Don't kill grandma" meme. Your comment implies to me that you may not have considered it. If you have and are happy with that, then that is your prerogative.

Each of those items above have various probabilities associated with them and rather a lot of external factors and so on. A vaccine's stated effectiveness in each area will obviously be some sort of average across a population.

That's the thing: Vaccines inoculate societies as a whole and not just individuals when you look at statistics. The phrase "anecdotes are not data" is particularly true here.

Even a "lol sad" 40% effective (whatever that means) vaccine will slow the spread of the thing across a population and reduce the possibility of individual deaths or other non optimal outcomes. When you start to look at the population as a whole you see huge numbers of people living instead of dying.

With luck, one of those survivors might be you or me one day. This is the only time I will advocate a sort of communist approach to things. By "risking" inoculation, you reduce the possibility that someone else might catch the disease. You also get some additional abilities to fight off the bloody thing too - nice!


The old people in my family usually get the shot. When I'm old, I might start to get it as well. Until then, I don't bother.


The flu didn't bother me 'til it knocked me on my ass for two weeks and I had brain fog for several months afterwards. The cost of a flu shot is a few bucks, a few minutes to get the jab, a sore muscle and mild symptoms for a day. That for 20-50% efficacy chance to avoid that 2-week monster flu? I'm in.


One big issue is that colloquially "the flu" is used to describe bad colds and other illnesses. Almost no one who has "the flu" has influenza. Thus people underestimate how bad influenza actually is


Actually I believe that in itself is a misunderstanding. Flu may be more likely than a cold statistically to hit someone badly, but it's quite possible to get the flu mildly, and it's quite possible to get really, really bad cold. The same way Covid being statistically more dangerous than the flu doesn't mean that every person getting infected by Covid has a worse time than every person getting the flu.


If taking a quick and harmless shot every year gives me up to a ~40% chance of avoiding disease then I’m good with that.

Definitely a better outcome than not getting a flu shot.


when I get the flu shot I typically spend a week with a non-functioning arm and feeling like I'm very sick. However, I still get flu vaccination because it seems likely that this maximizes the overall health of humanity, and I'm more interested in the health of humanity than my own, in the long term.


Good that you get the shot, but I'll just note that the symptom you describe is far worse than most people who get the flu shot. Most years I get it I have no symptoms at all besides slight arm soreness. Maybe one in five years I have a mild fever for a day.


> constant hassle

> something that doesn't bother me

Yeah you've never been unlucky enough to get a bad flu.

I'll absolutely choose the "constant hassle" of getting a flu shot (i.e. a 5 minute pit stop at the drug store once per year).

The flu sucks.


That's why a minority of people take a shot every year.


Yes that's why the effectiveness of the flu-shot differs between years


Yes. The CDC has this to say about flu virus mutation:

How Flu Viruses Can Change: “Drift” and “Shift”

Influenza (flu) viruses are constantly changing. They can change in two different ways.

Antigenic Drift

One way flu viruses change is called “antigenic drift.” Drift consists of small changes (or mutations) in the genes of influenza viruses that can lead to changes in the surface proteins of the virus, HA (hemagglutinin) and NA (neuraminidase). The HA and NA surface proteins of influenza viruses are “antigens,” which means they are recognized by the immune system and are capable of triggering an immune response, including production of antibodies that can block infection. The changes associated with antigenic drift happen continually over time as flu viruses replicate (i.e., infect a host and make copies of themselves). Most flu shots are designed to target the HA surface proteins/antigens of flu viruses. The nasal spray flu vaccine (LAIV) may target both the HA and NA of a flu virus.

The small changes that occur from antigenic drift usually produce viruses that are closely related to one another, which can be illustrated by their location close together on a phylogenetic tree. Flu viruses that are closely related to each other usually have similar antigenic properties. This means that antibodies your immune system creates against one flu virus will likely recognize and respond to antigenically similar flu viruses (this is called “cross-protection”).

However, the small changes associated with antigenic drift can accumulate over time and result in viruses that are antigenically different (further away on the phylogenetic tree). It also is possible for a single change in a particularly important location on the HA to result in antigenic drift. When antigenic drift occurs, the body’s immune system may not recognize and prevent sickness caused by the newer flu viruses. As a result, a person becomes susceptible to flu infection again, as antigenic drift has changed the virus’ antigenic properties enough that a person’s existing antibodies won’t recognize and neutralize the newer flu viruses.

Antigenic drift is an important reason why people can get flu more than one time. Drift is also a primary reason why the composition of flu vaccines for use in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres is reviewed annually and updated as needed to keep up with evolving flu viruses.

Antigenic Shift

Another type of change is called “antigenic shift.” Shift is an abrupt, major change in a flu A virus, resulting in new HA and/or new HA and NA proteins in flu viruses that infect humans. Antigenic shift can result in a new flu A subtype. Shift can happen if a flu virus from an animal population gains the ability to infect humans. Such animal-origin viruses can contain HA or HA/NA combinations that are different enough from human viruses that most people do not have immunity to the new (e.g., novel) virus. Such a “shift” occurred in the spring of 2009, when an H1N1 virus with genes from North American Swine, Eurasian Swine, humans and birds emerged to infect people and quickly spread, causing a pandemic. When shift happens, most people have little or no immunity against the new virus.

While flu viruses change all the time due to antigenic drift, antigenic shift happens less frequently. Flu pandemics occur rarely; there have been four flu pandemics in the past 100 years. For more information, see pandemic flu. Type A viruses undergo both antigenic drift and shift and are the only flu viruses known to cause pandemics, while flu type B viruses change only by the more gradual process of antigenic drift.

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/viruses/change.htm


I think you're missing the point. As a media event, you need the drama so that you are able to run the script you have planned.


Really simple: If this new variant does nothing more than previous versions to increase mortality, particularly among the increasingly vaccinated population, obsessing over its spread should be considered pointless and absurd. For one thing, it wouldn't work without endless other streams or authoritarian security theater measures (that in any case themselves don't really work most of the time) And for another thing, "stop the spread" is an idiotic notion without heavy qualification. Stop death? Sure, Stop large quantities of hospitalizations? That too, albeit with cost/benefit calculations applied to all measures, but stopping spread itself for its own sake? Absurd paranoia that has no merit the moment the thing spreading stops being a truly widespread threat. We have lived with colds and flus for all our history without obsessing over their spread. COVID among those who are already immunized or vaccinated is comparably dangerous to common flu strains.


Are existing vaccines effective against this new variant?


We simply don't have the data. It's all speculation at this point.


Israel reported one positive case and two suspected, all three vaccinated.


Vaccines only help you not get seriously ill, they don’t seem to help much with preventing covid infection in the first place


don't want to sound smug but I think this is very easy to understand with very basic knowledge about the immune system and some common sense.


I think you're overestimating the average citizen.


At this point those are anecdotes, not data


This again reminds that having all your own population gotten 3rd jab (or n-th jab) won't make the pandemic disappear.

Meanwhile rest of the world hasn't got their first dose of a reliable vaccine.


"South Africa has asked Johnson & Johnson (JNJ.N) and Pfizer (PFE.N) to delay delivery of COVID-19 vaccines because it now has too much stock, health ministry officials said, as vaccine hesitancy slows an inoculation campaign."

https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/exclusive-south-africa-...

If rest of the world don't want it, I'll take it (and did).


South Africa is one of the most developed countries in Africa though. World vaccination rate is something like 40% and it's not 60% anti-vaxxers.


Denmark was able to offer vacines to everybody because Rumania didn't want them.


[flagged]


The evidence isn't yet in for immunity persistence post-booster, with Pfizer or Moderna. There's a chance that immunity wanes less quickly with the booster's 6 month+ window vs the original 2nd shot's 3 week window. Of course, if a mutation evades the vaccine's design then it doesn't matter much, but for the moment I'm hopeful that 5 months out from a booster is still a relatively high protection %.


"...protection against hospitalization and death persisted at a robust level for 6 months after the second dose" (from the above linked article)

This is the important part in my opinion and I've heard it explained thus: the level of antibodies circulating in the body goes down after six months, so you may be susceptible to infection. However, the immune system creates something called "memory cells" which live in the lymphatic system and will activate a robust immune response if they come into contact with the antigen again.


That's how it's meant to work. If that were true you wouldn't be seeing so many people getting COVID after being vaccinated.

In reality all these explanations we're being given are nearly junk value. Public health researchers don't understand the immune system or mRNA based vaccines well enough to predict things like how it adapts or learns, and in particular they just ignore any factor that they don't have a fast/cheap test for (or sometimes any test).


Memory cells do not prevent infection, they live in the lymphatic system and are only activated if a pathogen gets past the "innate immune system" and gets to the point we typically refer to as "infection". So, to re-use your phrase: if that were true we'd be seeing vaccinated people getting infected but recovering quickly and generally not dying, which is exactly what we see.


Its also pretty challenging to publish research longer than 6 months when you only have 6 calendar months...


What's wrong with taking a vaccine booster every 3 months or so? I'll gladly do it to get more normalcy.

Production is being ramped up a lot so this kind of volume shouldn't be any issue soon.


I don't expect a schedule that tight, mostly because infections naturally wane in the summer months anyway. My (un)educated guess is that it will be rolled into the flu vaccine at some point and become a once-a-year occasion.


Well here in the local news they were saying that it really starts waning at 6 months and the EU is planning to reduce the validity of the certificate to 9 months because of that. So I do expect it to be a 6-monthly affair. But probably just one shot every time because it's a booster.

But I'd be ok with every 3 months too though I agree there should be no need for it. I'm high risk and my work did an antibody test after 3 months, and I was full of antibodies still at that point.


Variants will continue to to be generated as SARS-CoV-2 is almost certainly endemic. We should be focusing on developing and testing therapeutics and treatment protocols to help as many people as possible, rather than focusing so heavily on vaccinations.


Therapeutics and treatment protocols require a lot more medical staff to implement than a simple jab.

The only way to keep cases to a low enough level to be successfully 'processed' by the health system is to maintain fairly severe social restrictions - and maintain them forever.


Didn't vaccination require huge spending as well? I think governments over-relied on vaccination for their own reasons, even long after it became evident it wasn't going to magically solve the pandemic. At the very least, vaccines should always be combined with some sort of restrictions to prevent the appearance of new variants (since the vaccines themselve create a pressure for the virus towards an escape mutation)


Absolutely - to my mind vaccines should be used to drive infections to very low levels, if not complete eradication, for the reason you state.

I believe that all of our successful vaccination campaigns (against highly contagious viruses) have by necessity resulted in (near) eradication. E.g. Polio, Smallpox, Measles, Rabies (in animals)


Is Nu /ˈnjuː/ (en) /niː/ (cz) a good name? I assume that most people have heard first few letters of Greek alphabet. Yet after Delta they should have switched to Pokemon names. Would be much more robust. I can already imagine all the misspelling in Twitter rants.


> they should have switched to Pokemon names

The slogan "Gotta catch 'em all!" makes that idea even less viable than it first seems.


Maybe colors of PacMan ghosts then?


I wonder if we would eventually reach the Koffing and Weezing variant?


I think the Greek letter Xi is where we'll hit real trouble. "zai", "k'see", and "she" are all likely ways people will pronounce the letter.

I think most Americans have at this point enough exposure to news about China that they'd pronounce it "she", as if it were pinyin. In the fraternity/sorority system, I think most people pronounce it "zai", but my understanding is "k'see" or "ke-see" is closer to classical (and perhaps modern) Greek pronunciation.

I had an analogue control systems professor with a very strong accent (his catch phrase was "Quitch dewice wuh you choose?") who pronounced Xi close to correctly. I presume a huge chunk of the class (about half of the men, and many women at MIT were in fraternities/sororities/independent living groups at the time) probably dismissed his pronunciation of the Greek due to his accent in English and their prior exposure to the Greek alphabet in the "Greek" living system.


There are many covid variants. Nu is simply the next letter in the alphabet

Naming a disease after private intellectual property is a terrible idea. Im not sure what that would accomplish.


Sonic hedgehog (the gene) would disagree with you


The Shiny Charizard Variant would get the kids into it. Sibling post is right about the slogan though..


On the other hand, it may finally give a reason to learn it.


Given the stupefying number of anti-vaxers and rapid viral mutation rates, the only way we get out of this pandemic is by a relatively harmless variant out competing the more deadly ones. Same as with the Spanish Flu.


Fortunately this is the trend for most viruses. I have seen no evidence that the delta variant was more lethal, but that it was more transmissible. I have also seen numbers from my locality sequencing that suggested lethality was significant chunk less than that of alpha.


> I have seen no evidence that the delta variant was more lethal, but that it was more transmissible

Look here then:

https://www.cmaj.ca/content/193/42/E1619

Increased risk [compared to non-variant-of-concern SARS-COV-2] with the Delta variant was more pronounced at 108% (95% CI 78%–140%) for hospitalization, 235% (95% CI 160%–331%) for ICU admission and 133% (95% CI 54%–231%) for death.


Alpha falls into the variant of concern classification, and this is contrasting delta with non-VOCs unless I misunderstand.


Just the preceding sentence in the abstract

Compared with non-VOC SARS-CoV-2 strains, the adjusted elevation in risk associated with N501Y-positive variants was 52% (95% confidence interval [CI] 42%–63%) for hospitalization, 89% (95% CI 67%–117%) for ICU admission and 51% (95% CI 30%–78%) for death.

N501Y is alpha


Wasn't that always the case?


Pretty much. The R0 was high from the onset and has only gotten worse with new mutations. This isn't surprising either. To get to herd immunity, we'd need a very high percentage of the population to be immune. The one difference from before the vaccines is that we now know they don't make you immune.


Has any vaccine in known history been truly 100% effective? "Immunity" was never the goal to my understanding.


The Polio vaccine is >99% effective after the full course.


Polio and a few other vaccines really spoiled us in terms of what's realistic when vaccinating against a Coronavirus. Vaccinated != Immune, sadly.


No, but the chance of breakthrough infection with the current vaccines is high enough that it's unlikely to allow good herd immunity at realistic vaccination rates, which sucks.

Immunity is always the goal if you can get it. It's not how you judge success though, you're right.

Thankfully the vaccines do drastically reduce severe illnesses though, so that's something.


The boosters seem to help quite a bit. Perhaps higher effectiveness even than after the second dose.


It's called an endemy and it's totally normal and yes people die occasionally.


Has anyone ever attempted to intentionally spread a less lethal variant of a virus in order to speed up the crowding out of other strains? I could see us trying this if a quick spreading but innocuous strain is found.


Yeah I'm so hoping this will happen. Evolution will favor it of course, because a milder virus we won't fight so hard.


Dr. McCoy : Who knows? It might eventually cure the common cold, but lengthen lives? Poppycock! I can do more for you if you just eat right and exercise regularly.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0708474/characters/nm0001420


Very interesting graph on preliminary data is here.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FFECnaLXEAMtWdc?format=png&name=...



That is a rather hopeful chart. Even the very virulent Delta, in a country 25% vaccinated, has receded to almost negligible levels after ~4 months of flaring up.



Yeah, but this thread has a title that's comprehensible for humans.


Let’s hope Delta stays dominant - at least for a while - and in time for our next “update” shot:

https://github.com/cov-lineages/pango-designation/issues/343...


If "update" refers to updating the mRNA message to create the new S' protein in order to prompt your immune system to produce S' abs then I think you will be disappointed. This sort of "update" will almost certainly trigger a recall of the former S abs due to immunogenic imprinting. See also: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28479213/


Does that mean the people who got vaccinated won't benefit from a new vaccine, but unvaccinated people can?


Yes. And there is a small possibility that something even worse happens for those previously infected/vaccinated called antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE). ADE occurs when the antibodies generated during an immune response recognize and bind to a pathogen, but they are unable to prevent infection. Instead, these antibodies act as a “Trojan horse,” allowing the pathogen to get into cells and exacerbate the immune response.

The worst case with a new covid strain would be if people who were vaccinated by a previous vaccine or infected by an older strain experience antibody-dependent enhancement after being infected with the new strain. This is where the body recognized the new strain as the old and starts producing anti-bodies. These anti-bodies actually assist the new strain in infecting your cells, making the disease worse.

ADE has not been detected with any covid strains/vaccines so its not something to worry about for now but who knows what may happen in the future. I've been keeping my eye out for any news of ADE with any of these new strains.

Certain viruses like dengue fever can be much worse if you had previously caught a different strain due to ADE.

https://www.chop.edu/centers-programs/vaccine-education-cent...


Since the current vaccines are based on recognizing the spike protein, and since this South African (Nu?) variant has many mutations on the spike protein, what are the odds that a vaccinated person's immune system would recognize the mutated spike protein as being the same as the original one?


No idea. Time will tell but a high number of mutations is not ideal.


I didn’t know about any of this. Thanks all for your comments.

Now I’m getting some bad February 2020 déjà-vu reading this current thread about flights from Gauteng:

https://twitter.com/AdamJSchwarz/status/1464150235714932742?...


It's not surprising people are unaware of this. Part of the pitch was that these vaccines could be updated as easily as software and be rolled out quickly to combat whatever variant.


If you trigger a memory response why would it matter if it was recalling a different similar protein? Wouldnt your immune system also remember and respond to a real pathogen, suggesting that the orginal vaccine was sufficient? In what world do you identify a pathogen but the fail to respond to it? Its not as if your body responds significantly differently to distinct illnesses.

Perhaps my understanding here is too cursory but this claim is pretty extraordinary for what I know.


Your immune response can be triggered by a specific epitope but provide a less than optimal response. I'm not pulling this out of my ass. Moderna tried making a beta strain specific booster but noticed the original wild strain antibodies elicited from previous vaccination were activated. See also: https://www.cell.com/trends/immunology/fulltext/S1471-4906(2...

I suspect this is part of the reason why we never saw an "update" for the delta variant.


What is a less than optimal response? Partial binding?


Bind but not neutralize.


I'm curious to what extent this sort of data depends on positive tests. It seems there's kind of a contradiction here: we can detect huge numbers of mutations, but only if someone tests positive as otherwise a sample will be ignored by the labs (presumably?). Yet the tests are supposed to be extremely precise.

Does anyone know how the need to detect mutations is balanced against the need for the tests to be precise to a specific type of virus?


We could have a new mRNA vax against this (and delta) in days. Why are we still using an old vax that targets a strain that barely exists anymore?



Because Delta doesn’t evade the current vax immunity, it just replicates significantly faster.



Even if there was trust sufficient to accept any arbitrary mRNA as the proper target without testing logistics doesn't turn on a dime. Meanwhile here in the real world we have many idiots who think mRNA modifies their DNA.


Well it kind of does the same thing that modifying DNA would do, but without actually modifying it, so I can't really hate on people for that. But I don't care that much if other people get it. I want it for myself.


We could make the new vaccine in days, but then it would take many months to pass through all the regulatory barriers.

If the GOP had been smart they'd have been hammering Biden for that instead of doing whatever the hell they are doing. This was a prime opportunity to go "see? Government regulation is bad."


I too miss the good old days before the FDA was established. If a person taking a lethal snakeoil medicine dies, he has only himself to blame (posthumously).


And who exactly would be making sure companies didn't sell dangerous snake oils as harmless?

How can someone know what's in it if no one is testing medicines or enforcing some set of standards?


Who would make sure the regulators don't prevent a necessary and life saving vaccine or drug from reaching the marketplace in a timely manner?

Errors exist on both sides. In a time critical scenario like a pandemic, the cost of retarding availability of a vaccine could be enormous.

I don't see the problem with making vaccines (or drugs) that have not received FDA approval available, as long as they are clearly marked as such and informed consent is received.


Does anyone know an article which lists the actual mutations of this one? The Wikipedia variant article still doesn’t seem to have that info



This seems like possibly worse news than the appearance of Delta. Because we already had vaccines that worked against Delta.


Experts seem to be freaking out about Nu's genome. It's far out, and also it includes some of the nastiest mutations to come up in virus evolution studies, such as this: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-021-00954-4


Nasty mutations here referring to solely increased binding to ace2 receptor and increased transmissibility, but not lethality afaict.


As far as I can see, we don't have any idea as yet how well current vaccines will work against this new variant, although there is reason to suspect they could be less effective.


Africa will still have its say, like India.


if this variant is more contagious than Delta Plus, we will see it spreading in the UK. The UK seems to be the hub for corona variants. Alpha and Delta variants went haywire, if this one spreads in the UK we should be on alert.


UK has already red listed SA because of this. Probably means it’s a worry.


> So far, the threat B.1.1.529 poses beyond South Africa is far from clear, researchers say. It is unclear whether the variant is more transmissible than Delta

this is danger porn. pay it no mind and have happy holidays.


You were on this forum calling covid "a normal seasonal virus" in February of 2020, so maybe sit this one out.


Everyone commenting on Covid got something wrong at one point.


Everyone has made errors, yes. Ideally we will make fewer in the future.

To that end, we should consider the amount and directionality of errors made by individuals as we consider what weight to give their current predictions.


So when Fauci had this https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe2002387 published in March 2020 that included the words "This suggests that the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%)", what weighting should we give to his current credibility, would you say?


You’re stripping out important context there. He was comparing it to SARS and MERS with CFRs of 9-10%, so saying COVID-19 would be closer to the influenza end of the spectrum if, and only if, some of the early info on the infection fatality rate was correct.

What you did isn’t a good faith move. There’s tons to criticise Fauci on in any case, you shouldn’t need to selectively quote stuff like this.


I didn't think I was stripping out important context, but I will add more for your:

If one assumes that the number of asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic cases is several times as high as the number of reported cases, the case fatality rate may be considerably less than 1%. This suggests that the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%) or a pandemic influenza (similar to those in 1957 and 1968) rather than a disease similar to SARS or MERS, which have had case fatality rates of 9 to 10% and 36%, respectively.

I don't think that really changes things. The orders of magnitude are 0.1%, 1%, 10%, and he's saying it may be considerably less than 1%, i.e., much closer in relative magnitude (and obviously far nearer in absolute terms) to a seasonal flu.

You are the one who is missing the larger context of this thread, which has been an unfair bullying of someone going back over what they had said 2 years ago about covid and claiming he should "sit this one out". Given this is the position that the experts had back then, clearly having an opinion that it was like a seasonal flu was not way out of line.

And my question to OP about Fauci stands too. Given that is what he wrote, and I provided the link for full context, what credibility should we assign to his current statements.


Again, note the language used. First, it’s a summary of what’s suspected at the time, but with a lot of caveats around what’s uncertain. The statement being made the quoted portion is that it’s likely to have a CFR a lot closer to flu than to MERS or SARS 1. That’s still not inaccurate, what they missed was how infectious it was.

The piece also doesn’t argue against action or vigilance. It highlights the unknowns, risks, and some potential outcomes. As more information came out Fauci and others adjusted their reviews, predictions, and recommendations to suit.

It’s hardly the same thing as the group of people who’ve spent the last two years trying to downplay this virus every chance they got, and refused to learn from getting it wrong. Telling us it wasn’t serious, that it would die out on its own, that we didn’t need interventions like masks and social distancing, and all the rest.


Yep that's what was suspected at the time which is why these experts were saying it's probably more like a seasonal flu than a serious pandemic of other sorts, don't wear a mask, keep traveling, etc. And they were wrong (well, to some extent -- it's still probably around a 1% mortality rate so still arguably closer to a seasonal flu going by Fauci's same reasoning).

Clearly bullying here of a person for pretty much repeating what many experts like Fauci and politicians like Pelosi were saying at the time is way out of line. Hopefully you can agree on that.


Experts don't always get it right, but what differentiates those we trust from those we don't is that they're cautious, curious, and learn from new information to adjust their views and recommendations.

Plenty of scientists have admitted that they underestimated aspects of this pandemic, from the effectiveness of masking, to the likelihood and severity of variants, to how quickly vaccines would come on stream. But they learnt from it and moved on.

Someone who downplayed the pandemic from the very beginning and who, in response to a new variant that has virologists and epidemiologists extremely worried, says "this is danger porn. pay it no mind and have happy holidays" is neither a serious person nor worth listening to on this subject. They clearly haven't learnt from their past mistakes, or don't want to.


> Experts don't always get it right, but what differentiates those we trust from those we don't is that they're cautious, curious, and learn from new information to adjust their views and recommendations.

I don't think they do necessarily. I have heard very little in the way of contrition or reflection or honest explanation as to why so many got it wrong for so long. Wrong about the virus, wrong about how it spreads, wrong about vaccines, etc. And yet so many of them still act like they are absolutely certain of what they are saying, when it's clear they in fact don't.

Scientists and experts can be egotistical, dogmatic, inflexible, and rusted on to old ideas. That whole Planck's principle thing, you know.

> Someone who downplayed the pandemic from the very beginning and who,

Someone who said what many experts were saying, you mean?

> in response to a new variant that has virologists and epidemiologists extremely worried, says "this is danger porn. pay it no mind and have happy holidays" is neither a serious person nor worth listening to on this subject. They clearly haven't learnt from their past mistakes, or don't want to.

I disagree, I don't see how that follows. The media certainly have certainly hyped things up and exaggerated and peddled this danger porn. The OP was referring to a sentence from a news article, not a quote from a scientist. The claim is not that covid doesn't matter and this variant is harmless, it's that the news article is danger porn.

Which it is. If it's nothing there's not much we can do, if it's bad news there's not much we can do. As other top level comments say, mutations happen all the time. Look how many major variants there are https://www.who.int/en/activities/tracking-SARS-CoV-2-varian... what is there to gain by panicking every time a new one is found?


Weren't "experts" calling for events to continue and that border closures would be racist and that people should not wear masks around that time?

Maybe he was just listening to the experts.


Prominent scientists signed their names to articles saying that implying the virus was released from a lab (intentionally or otherwise) was racist and factually wrong.

Those scientists, by and large, have walked back their statements and admit that the hypothesis that this was a lab leak that occurred in Wuhan is not impossible and that stating it is not necessarily racist. Also, those folks aren't considered "experts" any more (everybody else lowered their priors about those expert's beliefs).


I've heard multiple references to experts/politicians/media "calling border closures racist" in early 2020, but only from conservative media claiming that liberals were espousing this viewpoint. Can someone provide sources or evidence for this?


From The Atlantic (https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/02/trump-r...), attributing comments to the WHO:

  *But critics from WHO and elsewhere have said the bans are unnecessary and could generate a racist backlash against Chinese people.*

  *Before long, Trump was running for president on an anti-immigrant platform. One message he pushed was that immigrants carry contagion. In 2015, he put out a statement warning that “tremendous infectious disease is pouring across the border,” a claim unsupported by fact.* [ha! That hasn't aged well: https://news.yahoo.com/dhs-dropped-40-000-covid-190800213.html ]
From Huffington Post: https://www.huffpost.com/archive/in/entry/china-donald-trump...:

  *Just a month after praising China for its handing of the COVID-19 outbreak, U.S. President Donald Trump has sent out a racist tweet terming the coronavirus as “Chinese Virus”.*
From Business Insider: https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-using-racism-against-c...

  *President Donald Trump and his Republican allies are using racism to try to distract from his disastrous preparations for and response to the coronavirus pandemic. Instead of taking responsibility for and addressing early failures, they're blaming the crisis on China.*


The reason was that the GOP was allegedly looking for an excuse to close the borders and further their anti-immigration agenda, and used the pandemic as an excuse.

"The president’s chief adviser on immigration, Stephen Miller, had long tried to halt migration based on public health, without success. Then came the coronavirus."[1]

"The idea that immigrants carry infections into the country echoes a racist notion with a long history in the United States that associates minorities with disease."[1]

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/03/us/coronavirus-immigratio...


First hit in the first page of a simple google search.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/xenophobe-chief-de...

Weird you have no recollection of it. It was pretty loud in the media for a while there.


This article comes from April 21, 2020, not Feb 2020 as GP mentioned. Apparently it was a Democrat response to a tweet announcing a border closure after the US had already seen 42000 deaths (fta). This looks like Democrats criticizing a policy of shutting the barn door after the animals had already left the barn.


No it doesn't it looks like recklessly spreading disinformation during a crisis purely for personal political gain.

The US has had strict border restrictions on foreign citizens through most of 2021 too. So unless you are going to call the Biden administration racist and xenophobic as well, then this reasoning doesn't work. But even if you did, then what you're saying about barn doors still contradicts what most experts have said in terms of reducing the movement of people to slow the spread.


Didn't Nancy Pelosi go to hug people in China town in late Feb 2020?

Nancy Pelosi Visits San Francisco's Chinatown Amid Coronavirus Concerns https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/nancy-pelosi-visits-sa...

"Fear of the Virus is Racially Motivated."

Around the time the Trump administration announced the travel restriction, Biden said that Trump had a “record of hysteria, xenophobia, and fear-mongering.”

In late January, the Trump administration implemented a travel restriction from China, where the coronavirus originated.

Some on the left described the move as a racist or xenophobic ploy aimed at punishing a country that Trump has clashed with over trade.

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/498350-biden-trumps-co...


I mean, it was true that shutting down the border to China was mostly a policy based on xenophobia than any actual facts, because at that point the vast majority of people spreading Covid into the US werent the Chinese. The huge NYC early spike started from an traveler from Europe.


This is unlikely to be true and probably an attempt to rewrite the history based on current knowledge and hate of Trump.

The reality is, that back then, there was simply no better information than "coming from China". It wasn't based on xenophobia at all, just on common sense (that seemed to defy the Democrats / mainstream media). In beginning of March, Trump also closed borders to Europe. Xenophobic? No, Europe was having a spike (e.g. Bergamo, Italy). EU "president", Ursula von der Leyen, criticised the decision. 2 weeks later, EU closed its borders. (Ursula is another person that prefers politics to common sense.)


It actually is true, the US’s SARS-CoV-2 lineages were predominantly from Europe. Especially Italy.


There's some evidence in retrospect that a lot of the spread to the US was from Italy. There wre two huge problems with using that as proof Pelosi and co were right to call the travel bans xenophobic. Firstly, it suggests the US policies basically succeeded at stopping the virus spreading there from China whilst Italy failed (and likely doomed the rest of the world in the process). Secondly, in order to block travel from Italy early enough, the US would've had to do it when Italy was consistently reporting zero cases week after week. Given that pretty much the entire US mainstream media and political insisted that it was xenophobic and unjustified to stop travel from Europe even after there was evidence of a major outbreak, I can't imagine there'd be much support for doing so when Italy reported zero cases and the US had cases from China - even though the reason for that was that Italy was doing worse at detecting outbreaks and those local cases turned out to be much less of a problem than ones from zero-case Italy.

Something seems to have gone really badly wrong in Italy and it's somehow gone entirely unexamined by the media, despite the fact that it did more to doom the rest of the world's efforts than any of the countries that have been blamed for doing so. Entirely unrelately, Italy is lead by the kind of boring technocrat that the media likes rather than some Trumpian populist figure.


Yes, despite of all the cover-ups and lyings China is never responsible. And everyone else is responsible for pandemic.


It’s an intentional misrepresentation of Pelosi and others decrying violence against Asian people.


Your comment violates the HN guidelines which are available here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

(and several others)


Yes, but none of those "experts" were calling it "a normal seasonal virus", they just didn't believe such measures were necessary. SARS-COV-1 didn't require widespread border closures or masking, and it very much wasn't "a normal seasonal virus".


Yep so the rhetoric about it could easily have lead someone to think it wasn't much more to worry about than the seasonal flu.


That's fair, but when people have opinions based on weak evidence, they should hold those opinions weakly, rather than reinforcing them to others.


Are you criticizing the experts here? Careful that's verboten.


I'm not, no. As more evidence is accumulated to support a hypothesis, it is rational to strengthen one's belief in it. All beliefs should start out weakly held, until sufficient evidence is gathered to either reinforce or change them. And of course even strongly held beliefs should be re-examined if sufficient evidence piles up to the contrary.


So the incorrect opinions based on weak evidence that the experts had over the past years of covid should not have been "reinforced to others"? That sounds to me like a criticism of the experts.


No, the experts were disseminating the best available evidence at that time. I will criticize some steps by policy makers, like stating initially that masks were ineffective when in reality they were trying to discourage mask shortages to keep them for essential workers. I think in cases like that it's better to be honest with the public. But I don't have any criticism for scientists who accurately portray the best available evidence at a given time.

My criticism was for the the hypothetical that the OP may have rationally stated that the virus was nothing more serious than a seasonal flu, based on experts stating that borders should not be closed. The statement that borders should not be closed was based on the most relevant research at the time; it turned out to be incorrect and was later reversed. But as a lay person, making the jump from that statement to the opinion that the virus is no big deal, and then echoing that opinion to others as fact, is not rational. One might have taken it as weak evidence in that direction, but no more than that.


If "experts" were saying not to wear masks, insisting that border restrictions were racist and xenophobic, telling people to go out and gather in large groups in public, then OP said absolutely nothing wrong by claiming it was no more serious than the seasonal flu.

Now we know that some "experts" were just totally wrong and had no idea what they were talking about, and others were in fact spreading misinformation abouta pandemic for political gain. But that is not OP's fault. You can't condemn him and absolve the actual people who reinforced that incorrect information to him in the first place. Ludicrous.


From the very early days of the Wuhan outbreak it was clear, and was the consensus of experts, that the virus was much more serious than a seasonal flu. There was indeed disagreement as to the best ways to combat it, but it was not said (by anyone credible that I saw) nor implied that the virus itself wasn't serious. I'm sure you could find an occasional counter-example, as there are going to be people in any field who are wrong about any given subject, but the consensus was pretty clear. (Note that I'm talking about actual experts, not politicians or pundits.)


What data do you base your claims on?

Studies like this one, https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal..., do not support what you are saying. Experts predicted 30,000 people would die from covid in the UK by the end of 2020, compared with yearly deaths from influenza which is usually quoted at about 25,000-30,000.


What were your thoughts on it in February 2020?


Bill Maher said it best. "Before you get sick you are sick. This is a very sick country, still is, I don't mean mentally, but physically"

We were already dying before February 2020. America is fat and we'll never get universal healthcare because people can't take responsibility for their actions. 80% of people who died from this thing were obese. If it hit 40 years ago it would have been nothing or similar to Hong Kong Flu


in feb 2020 I knew this wasn't going to be an existential crisis (IE, it wasn't going to kill 90% of people,and if the economy tanked, it wouldn't be because the virus itself was so virulent) and that ultimately it would begin to look more like other persistent viruses. This whole thing has played out more or less like I expected based on my prior experience with viruses.

I am not happy that the people announced this did so with scare tactics (specific wording) rather than emotionless facts.


Ok, but that leaves the option that it kills up to 10% of the people and I can guarantee you that if that ends up being the case a lot of people will feel that we should have probably taken things a bit more serious in March 2020.

Emotionless facts can be scary in their own right.


10% of what people? That doesn't match up with any stats that I'm aware of. Unless you mean "it kills up to 10% of people within certain population demographics" which is my point- and it's entirely uninteresting.

I think US public health officials and generally in europe the leadership all pursued the most reasonable path and it's unlikely we could have reduced the overall death load significantly through any intervention short of extreme isolation. It is very unlikely that mainstream science will conclude, in a decade, that we could have taken actions that would have greatly reduced the spread and impact, without also applying highly restrictive rules.


> Unless you mean "it kills up to 10% of people within certain population demographics" which is my point- and it's entirely uninteresting.

Then I don't think we're going to end up being in agreement. To me the world isn't a science experiment where some outcomes are interesting and others are uninteresting when it comes to the deaths of millions of people. Call me a softie if you wish.


Please point to the source of your 10% stat.

Obviously it's terrible that millions of people died. But then, millions of people died from the black plague, many die from car accidents, and preventable (via lifestyle changes) diseases. As an ex-scientist I work hard to take the long view on disease- that is, billions of years. Once you adopt this perspective and look at COVID, you realize that many aspects of it have been overreported in the press and that led many people to overestimate its relative danger compared to many other things we face on a regular basis.

  The current reporting about the newest virus is a great example- the language is scary, but we have absolutely no data to tell us that this will have any global impact, nor that this represents any sort of phase change into a new situation.


Your own comment. 100% - 90% = 10% and that was marked as just a possibility.

> As an ex-scientist I work hard to take the long view on disease- that is, billions of years.

That's fine, but that timescale is not the timescale at which our lives are unfolding.

> Once you adopt this perspective and look at COVID, you realize that many aspects of it have been overreported in the press and that led many people to overestimate its relative danger compared to many other things we face on a regular basis.

Well, even if I take the most conservative figures I end up with millions of 'front-loaded' deaths, and 100's of thousands of deaths where 'premature' is probably an accurate figure. And that's before we get to take into account that this is long from being over.

> The current reporting about the newest virus is a great example- the language is scary, but we have absolutely no data to tell us that this will have any global impact, nor that this represents any sort of phase change into a new situation.

That is absolutely true. But at the same time we also don't have any data for the opposite: that this will not affect things at all. Policy makers are in a bind, anything they do that helps will come with a price tag, the cost of doing nothing is likely political suicide, the cost of doing too much is going to come at the price of a massive global recession (and possibly set the stage for future wars).

So now we get this stretched out slow motion train wreck, which is far from ideal as well. What would you suggest we do instead?


My suggestion (and I strongly recommend nobody takes it) is to immediately go forward with no masking, no vaccination, special triage centers for people with COVID (so they aren't infecting people with comorbidities going to hospitals), accept the catastrophic loss of life, and then watch carefully over the next ten years. My belief is that if this happens, the entire global population will have enough natural immunity that this disease will become endemic.

As I said, nobody should follow my advice. it would be political suicide- in the same way that people who promote "death panels" (to allocate limited resources rationally) get shut down, even though it's the most rational approach that would maximize global health.

Further, everything I suggested above is merely intuition based on several decades of experience working in public health/medical biology, rather than hard epidemiological data. I could be completely wrong and my strategy could instead lead to a black death scenario or existential situation (death rates of 30+% due to virulent variants with high transmission rates and very long infectious periods). Again, I must say that nobody should follow my recommendation because it's based entirely on a lifetime of systems thinking and working with complex biological entities.


It's a bit strange to see a suggestion like that accompanied by the disclaimer that it shouldn't be taken. What scenario would you suggest that is not accompanied by such a disclaimer? In other words, say we put you in charge of public policy tomorrow without the option to abdicate, what would you suggest we do, assuming it would actually be done as you advise?


Build a time machine and invest more in the CDC and the NIH back in 1985?

Seriously though I can't think of a more reasonable strategy than that carried out by the US, Sweden, and China (each represents a different experiment).

China's extreme level of population restriction and high level of testing seems to have greatly reduced transmission and impact (I don't know how to interpret China's published numbers, and I don't really trust them that much). This is probably necessary in any area where population density is high enough that rapid transmission can occur. However, my guess is that it also led to a large number immune-naive people and I don't think that any current vaccine will be useful for more than a year, so I think they're at constant risk of explosive disease growth that they can only address through strict policies.

For countries with fairly small number of dense cities, like Sweden, I think what they did was excellent. They stated their prior beliefs and more or less stuck to them and, in my interpretation, they did not suffer any more than other countries, when population density is considered.

Finally, the US. The US did fairly well even though there is a large noncompliant population for a number of reasons. First, we've invested heavily in disease management infrastructure (research, hospitals, strong public health) which meant that we could deal with (to some extent) the massive surge of patients going to hospitals who then infected others nosocomically, and have industries that developed vaccines and other treatments quickly. Second, we actually have a well organized public health system that is relatively powered to implement unpopular but reasonable policies. But, I worry that our court system moves too slowly (for example I would really like to see the supreme court making an extraordinary decision that the US has full rights to mandate vaccines for its entire population) and we have a large number of people who seem to actively fight reasonable public health measures.

So in short, the best approach is to have a large amount of resources (public health researchers, medical folks) combined with excellent realtime knowledge about spread, a largely compliant population which is willing to suspend civil liberties in emergency situations, and political leaders who are willing to risk their long-term careers by providing cover for the researchers.

Finally, thank goodness that the US had the foresight to make and fund the NIH and CDC for so long, providing us with an excellent foundation with which to respond to diseases like this. I am in awe of the folks who pushed for the creation of a new field (molecular biology) in the 30s and 40s which led to the elucidation of the genetic code and development of structural biology, which ultimately provides the foundation for much of our understanding of viruses.


Fair enough, thank you. I like to keep things grounded in reality, theoretical considerations are fine for after the fact analysis but in a fluid situation decisions need to be made. They'll never be perfect but not deciding is abdication and that isn't really an option.

Where I live the health care system has been weakened to the point that we can't really deal with such levels of calamity in a responsible manner any more, the result of years of neo-liberal cost cutting and attempts to create a market situation around health care. The end result is a terribly fragile mix of high density populations, extreme mobility and very little cushion to absorb mistakes. It remains to be seen if either one of the three scenarios you sketched will work for us in the longer term, so far it's not looking all that good but it also could have been far worse.


I have long predicted that health care will bankrupt america.


Less developed than today, can the persistent downplayers honestly say the same?


Doesn't seem a wrong stake, the population was naive to this virus, but except that what is special with covid?


It's not very special from a historical perspective. It appears to be very similar to HCoV-OC43.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7252012/


Umm all the deaths?


Let's look back at those deaths in about 10 years. I predict that over time, epidemiologists will have much better estimates on who died of what and when and what the risk factors for death are. From what I can tell, much of the deaths are front-loaded (IE, we saw them over a few years instead of decades), and concentrated in people who had comordibities.

People evolved to respond to the flu over millenia before there was widespread travel. I think that explains much of the dynamics of covid.


We've been working hard as society to allow people to continue to live with chronic disease. Co-morbidities is just another way of saying 'they would have died sooner or later anyway', but for all of these cases you are looking at individuals and people that have family and dependents. In the long term all deaths are 'front-loaded'. Every person that dies of traffic, obesity, terrorism, disease, famine and so on would have eventually died anyway from some other cause. That doesn't stop us from trying to address these causes of death resulting in people living longer. We don't call those who live to an older age with diabetes 'time stealers' any more than we should call people that die early of COVID+some other factor 'front loaded'.


I really hate this argument (that people who die of Covid would have died soon anyway). Everyone will die eventually, so let's not treat any disease? Let's withhold all medical care from people over 80... almost all of them will be dead in 10 years, why treat them?

A premature death is a premature death, no matter how many years it cuts off.


Nothing, we didn’t have the whole world locked down for 1 year for the first time in a pandemic…


We didn't this time either.


"the population was naive to this virus"

That's precisely what made it abnormal. The population isn't naive to normal seasonal viruses.


Here’s what I wrote in May 2020 (I underestimated both the seasonality, and the speed of mutations, at least): https://guscost.com/2020/05/12/pandemic-woo/


[flagged]


What? Please point to any time anywhere near there, that Anthony Fauci has called Covid a "normal seasonal virus".


If they post here I'll zing them too


On what basis? Have you offered evidence of your thoughts during that time? Does that even matter?

Hindsight is 20/20. I hope that most of HN will forgive me for questioning the notion that u/idlewords is somehow entitled to disqualify others from this discussion about variants.


There’s a thread on Twitter here that makes it quite concerning

https://twitter.com/miamalan/status/1463846528578109444?s=21

I don’t have a background to properly analyse this but to me it looks legit.



90% of new infections being this new variant should be quite alarming


I am definitely alarmed. What I learned while doom-scrolling

* SA has a <50% vaccination rate, so its not quite clear whether its spread could be circumvent vaccine-induced antibodies * SA is past its delta-wave, so this variant has made relatively huge gain over delta, but absolute numbers are still fairly moderate.

I'm all in for taking necessary precautions for slowing down the arrival of the new variant in other countries, but it seems it isn't clear yet that the effect we see in South Africa will replicate elsewhere.


> * SA has a <50% vaccination rate

it's closer to 25% countrywide, according to https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations?country=ZAF

But this source says 35%: https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/exclusive-south-africa-...

It will be higher in urban areas, and lower outside of them.


A variant outcompeting other variants isn’t in and of itself concerning. Viruses mutate in order spread more effectively, not surprising. Does it produce milder or more extreme symptoms? That’s the interesting part and the article doesn’t go into any specifics.


Hmmm I'm totally just babbling here but this makes me think if it'd be possible to just engineer a harmless strain that is more effective at being transmitted (or perhaps even circumvents vaccines better). Then instead of worrying about vaccinating people we could just try to have that strain spread faster than the harmful ones

A similar thing happened in some South American countries with a cholera outbreak. Strains that made people more sick forced them to stay inside whereas the more harmless strains allowed people to socialize more and the harmless ones ended up spreading faster


That's not an entirely new idea, and it's not entirely crazy, but it has a lot of issues.

What are the ethics in engineering a new virus and deliberately infecting people? What happens if some of those people die? What happens if your variant that has been engineered to spread extremely effectively mutates into something more lethal? How do you test your engineered virus? Large-scale tests on people? How would that be faster or more effective than producing a new vaccine and testing that instead? What happens if your tests show that the engineered virus is not as benevolent as you hoped, and is actually rather horrific? Can you put the genie back in the bottle?


>What happens if your variant that has been engineered to spread extremely effectively mutates into something more lethal?

This alone should make it a non-option, there will be no way to contain it or stop it from mutating, I fail to see how it wouldn't just be a question of time the same way COVID variants are. The consequences could be disastrous and simply worsen the situation.


I'm not an expert at all, but I don't think viruses are mutually exclusive. Spread of the new strain can be fast and can became widespread, but can't decrease or affect the harmful one.


It would be likely to have engineered itself if that was the case. Unfortunately, afaik so far there isn't a correlation between any specific mutation and milder disease


The solution to overreaction should probably be to adjust the reaction to information, not to ignore information altogether.


I’m sure it’s not hard to grasp how people might react to “puts scientists on alert”.


Ehh - the majority of times I've seen researchers claim this, the variant has turned out to be more transmissible than other variants. Researchers seem to have a track record of being really hesitant to rule out founder effects and acknowledge higher transmissibility even when a variant is clearly spreading faster than its competition.


Well sure but we could easily wait a week until scientists know more. What would you do now that you’re not doing already?


> What would you do now that you’re not doing already?

Well, if you're a policymaker then suspending travel to prevent it from spreading internationally. If it's the worst case (more infectious than delta + immune evading) then buying a little time to adapt vaccines or produce the recently announced antivirals could save a lot of lives.


U.K. put South Africa and other African countries in the red list for example.


We aren’t policy makers, though.


HN regularly discusses topics which primarily have policy implications, and there likely are policy makers who lurk here.


The locations of the spread of this variant might inform whether / when I choose to get a booster (third dose). If it starts spreading in the US, I might get a third dose to be safe. Until then, I'll avoid doing so as I do not want to contribute to domestic vaccine demand (which induces the US to stockpile more doses and export fewer doses to the rest of the world where they're more urgently needed).


I think responses should be local, instead of countries essentially waiting and coordinating themselves in a cascade. If possible new variants should be contained at least until it is clear if they are more dangerous or not. So far china has been able to basically be covid-free by using local strategies, something we havent seen in the west


>So far china has been able to basically be covid-free by using local strategies, something we havent seen in the west

This was effectively the approach New Zealand took but it wasn't sustainable. Maybe it would be more effective when implemented by an authoritarian regime (although difficult to measure given issues with transparency) but even then it won't last. China's going to have to start learning to live with Covid like every other country has had to.


The EU is already acting to stop flights from south africa in an attempt to contain the spread. I think the world is finally adopting the New zealand strategy: local, stringent lockdowns. We are not yet ready to try to "live with covid", because it's too dangerous and we can't treat it "like the flu" until we have widely used effective antivirals.


don't socialize as much. if you have to have an event try to do it outside or ensure certain safety measures. make sure you and people you're hanging out with have their booster shots, etc. There's a lot


Run around screaming, of course!

Have to get rid of the holiday-calories _somehow_.


I have never considered the calorie-burning benefits of screaming while running before, opting for just simple running without any type of noise-making before. Maybe I've been missing out on amazing health benefits this whole time! I think I'll have to try tomorrow.

(/s for those who were doubting)


Note the UK government, who are incredibly slow and incompetent, reacted within hours to the news breaking with a travel ban from six countries the variant has been identified in. That speed of reaction makes me think there’s something to this.


Couldn't be more predictable. Just before festive period.


That just means there's not enough data. The data from South Africa itself shows it's spreading dramatically faster than even Delta did which is already showing itself in the increase in new cases rapidly spiking up. Whether or not this new variant causes more or less sever disease is still to be shown


Does nature.com have a track record of danger porn?


In my field nature papers have a reputation for employing a fair amount of poetic licence. Have no idea how universal this is .


I worked with someone (this is in astronomy) who said that papers in nature were the most likely to be wrong. They are in nature because they have a dramatic (new/unexpected) result. One good reason for a new/unexpected result is a mistake somewhere.

Edit: I'm not saying anything about this paper. I know nothing about this. Just a meta comment that, in really hard to get published in journals, there might be a bi-modality of papers. Really important and really wrong :)


This is correct. Think of nature as a journal that publishes papers with a high rate of false positives (claims that turn out to be untrue) on purpose,to intentionally stimulate the state of the art of science.

I have actively ignored Nature and Science papers for my entire career (with the exception of my one Nature publication, and W&C 1953 of course).


It likely says something that, as an epidemiologist, the only way I've ever gotten a paper into Nature/Science is during a scary infectious disease epidemic. The rest of the time, they're largely uninterested.


If compared to Buzzfeed or the Daily Mail, definitely not. If compared to more specialized academic publishers, yes.


Over a decade ago there were articles in there which were so obviously terrible tuat even a freshman could refute it. Sadly I can only vaguely recall a few curves from the cover and that it was shockingly bad.


Extremely dangerous view. It happened twice until now that humanity thought like this and we paif a heavy price. Time for "better panic than sorry" approach.


On the other hand the earlier pandemics were over much quicker. For example I read about the anti mask league in San Francisco. The masks were only mandatory there for a couple of months! After that things were already getting back on track. After 3 big waves it was all over and things were back to normal. Death toll was high but during a short period. And very localised. Here in the Netherlands the Spanish flu was hardly a thing at all.

I wonder if in the end we're just prolonging the agony. And the measures have a human cost too. Depression, loss of economic welfare which leads to poorer health conditions.

There's more and more talk of letting things slide more ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29337373 for example) and I'm personally wondering if this isn't the right thing too. Corona isn't going away and if we have to keep living with constant lockdowns and masks there isn't much quality of life left. And really eventually we're all catching it anyway. I'm totally happy taking as many vaccines as needed but long-term behavioural changes into directions which are not human nature is a big price to pay.

We can't do this right away (we need more vaccination levels and effective medication) and we have to seriously invest in healthcare but as an end-goal this looks like a much more positive future perspective to me than continuing to fight against every infection.

Personally I'd gladly take a bit higher chance of dying instead of having to struggle with these measures every day.


No, if we don't know how lethal is this variant we can't be more liberal simple as that.


We still don't know if Delta was much more transmissible than Alpha actually. We have only observed that Delta spread faster than Alpha at some point in time.

Not only have happy holiday, but also have happy return to normal. Most adults are vaxxed, if we don't remove restrictions now we will never remove them.


Fully agree with your second paragraph but your first paragraph is nonsense.

We have evidence that Delta has a much larger viral load and that it has outcompeted the Alpha variant everywhere in the world. You have to be in total denial to pretend the Delta variant might have been no more transmissible than Alpha.


I said it spread faster at one point in time, what is different than what you said?

Imagine delta and alpha are both introduced in a naive population at the exact same time. Which one will spread faster? No one has a clue


You've seemingly reduced 'Delta is more transmissible' to its most meaningless interpretation.

A large (mostly) unvaccinated and uninfected population has been exposed to both variants and the delta variant won out, what more proof do you want?


Delta will spread faster. We know this from seeing it spread in countries that have low vaccination rates and easily outcompete other variants. This can also be seen in laboratory experiments.


Delta since it outcompeted Alpha everywhere in the world.


I don't think it can be called normal when hospitals are near capacity in some states (e.g. CO).


ICUs being near capacity is actually very normal, especially during flu season.


Zero availability in half the state?


Yeah that's definitely worse than normal. Though not wildly out of the norm either. A significant fraction typically are diverting to ICUs at other hospitals, but normally not half the hospitals.


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