Britain tightens lockdowns over virus mutation with 'significantly faster' transmission rates

[DonViejo]

Source: Washington Post


By William Booth
Dec. 19, 2020 at 11:41 a.m. EST

LONDON — Faced with a new mutation of the coronavirus with "significantly faster" transmission rates, Prime Minister Boris Johnson tightened pandemic restrictions, including banning travel abroad in some parts of the country and rolling back relaxed rules over the holiday period.

The new mutation, or variants, was first detected in southeast England in September and is becoming more prevalent in new cases.

England’s Chief medical officer Chris Whitty said scientists consider this new strain to move more quickly between people.

Whitty said there is no evidence at this time to suggest the new strain is more deadly or able to elude vaccines designed to defeat it.

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/coronavirus-mutation-britain-lockdown/2020/12/19/fd010eea-4206-11eb-b58b-1623f6267960_story.html

[progree]

1. Uggh. Back in 'Merica, daily new cases were almost plateauing, but now there's a definite

upward curl in the 7 day moving average

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-us-cases.html

Plateauing for a week, from Dec 9 to Dec 16, but then going up again

Dec 16   211,088
Dec 18   218,619
+3.6% in 2 days

reaching yet another new all time high in this metric.

And up 19% in the past 14 days (7 day moving average on Dec 18 vs. 7 day moving average on Dec 4)

The actual case count on December 18 was 251,343

Daily deaths are also at all time highs. On December 18, there were 2805 Covid deaths reported. The 7 day moving average on Dec 18 was 2575.

How long did it take us to get to the U.S. Vietnam War death toll of 58,000? Many months.

Well at this rate (using 2575 / day), we'll add another Vietnam War in 22.5 days.

[Ford_Prefect]

2. Since early last year there was substantial evidence of regional variation in COVID samples

symptomatology, and apparent virulence. Some have warned it could mutate to a more dangerous form if not several forms. Looks like those warnings were on target.

Had wiser heads prevailed and more isolation, masking and the like been advocated, such evolution may not have occurred or might have been delayed to a point where inoculation could further reduce the playing field for mutations.

[My Pet Orangutan]

4. It is unlikely to mutate into a more virulent form.

The path of viral evolution is typically more transmissable, less lethal.

[Warpy]

6. The glaring exception to that was the 1918 flu pandemic

It was incredibly infectious and lethal and no one really knows what the mechanism was, but the death rate could be as high as 90% among some adult populations, most notably Alaskan natives.

We're going to have to wait and see with this one. It could attenuate down to another coronavirus common cold virus or it could become more contagious and as deadly as the original SARS. We really don't know what an RNA virus is going to do next, only that they do it relatively quickly.

[My Pet Orangutan]

8. The 1918 flu was extinct within a year - for that reason.

[Warpy]

11. It started in the spring of 1918 and disn't start to disappear until the spring 0f 1920

There were three distinct waves of it, the 1918-1919 winter being the deadliest. The 1919-1920 wave hit the desert southwest and, though it wasn't quite as deadly as the previous year's outbreak, it was said that town church bells tolled around the clock for the dead.

H1N1 flu is still out there, it has simply gotten less deadly.

There is an H3N1 avian virus in Asia right now that kills 70% of people infected with it. There has never been a case of person to person transmission--not yet. It's one to watch out for.

[moriah]

10. There are whole books on theories about the 1918 flu, and....

... most implicate the same environments that enabled measles outbreaks in army cantonments as giving the new virus a lot of "human test subjects" to "learn" how to infect us.

When there's lots of humans that a virus can infect and they're placed close together so there's not a whole lot of effort involved in transmission for the virus, it's essentially doing a "serial infection" experiment on us. You can read how if you repeat Koch's postulates over and over again (take blood from a sick critter, give it to a healthy one, take blood from newly-made-sick critter, give to another, repeat) you end up with a virus that, even if it *wasn't* good at infecting guinea pigs before, is now incredibly virulent in guinea pigs (but may not be in humans). Cuz the experimenter took out selection for transmission criteria, and only allowed selection for virulence.

So now spread all those humans out, cuz they're aware now a little virion is experimenting on us (or at least we wish all our fellow humans WERE aware and not congregating and masked up). Even with just some of us spread further apart, the virus has to learn more sneaky ways -- being contagious while its host isn't obviously sick, being more effective at aerosol transmission, etc. The selection pressure is now on getting to a new host, not necessarily being the fastest reproducing of all the viruses in the swarm in that specific human.

[rwsanders]

7. Not necessarily correlated unless it kills the host too fast to allow time for transmission.

[My Pet Orangutan]

9. Not necessarily, but typically.

A more transmissible, less lethal strain has a competitive advantage over its ancestors, and typically displaces them.

[yaesu]

3. so the virus ravaging our country now is supposed to be the same variant that mutated some months

ago & it is supposed to be 10 times more infectious than the original strain. Now, is their strain yet another mutation that has become even more contagious or is it our variant? I know, according to the experts and makes sense per laws of nature that generally when a virus mutates to a more contagious variant it loses some of its lethality.

[Evolve Dammit]

5. Good question. Some may know, but we are left to wonder. So many unknowns right now.