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Home » There’s a new strain of COVID in the UK – so, what does it mean?

There’s a new strain of COVID in the UK – so, what does it mean?

The New Neo Posted on by

These days, when I see headlines saying that there’s a new strain of COVID in the UK, my kneejerk reaction is to think: “it wouldn’t surprise me if they’re hyping this because they want people to become more scared again, now that the vaccine is here.” And I don’t think that represents paranoia on my part; I think it’s something that various government agencies and officials and the MSM have fully earned by their behavior for the past ten months.

In CNN’s story, you can see that the first few paragraphs emphasize the fear:

The United Kingdom has identified a new, potentially more contagious coronavirus variant linked to a recent surge in cases in England.

The new variant is being called VUI-202012/01 — the first “Variant Under Investigation” in the UK in December 2020. While scientists hunt for more information about the variant, its impact is already being felt.

Multiple countries have now imposed restrictions on travelers from the UK. British Health Secretary Matt Hancock said Sunday that the variant was “out of control” and Prime Minister Boris Johnson chaired an emergency meeting Monday as his government tried to manage the fallout.

I bet most people wouldn’t even read past that point, but they’d certainly get a frightening impression from it. You have to read quite far down in the article before you get to this:

Multiple experts have also suggested that this new variant could have been amplified because of a superspreader event, meaning the current spike in cases could also have been caused by human behavior.

“A higher genomic growth rate in the samples sequenced, may not necessarily mean higher transmissibility…

Hmmmm. And you have to read even further to get to this:

There is no evidence to suggest that the new variant is more deadly as of now, according to Whitty, who said that “urgent work” was underway on Saturday examining the implications for mortality. “We are not seeing any increased virulence (clinical severity) or any gross changes in the [spike protein] that will reduce vaccine effectiveness — so far,” Tang told the Science Media Centre (SMC.)…

Multiple experts have pointed out that for some viruses increasing transmissability can accompany decreasing virulence and mortality rates. This may mean that the variant is less lethal, though it’s currently too early to tell…

Whitty said Saturday that current vaccines should still work against the new variant. His remarks were echoed in the US by the head of Operation Warp Speed. “Up to now, I don’t think there has been a single variant that would be resistant to the vaccine,” Moncef Slaoui told CNN on Sunday. “We can’t exclude it, but it’s not there now.”

I would bet a large amount of money that most people who have heard of this virus have not heard the news that it may not be more transmittable, it almost certainly is not more virulent, and the vaccine should remain effective against it.

Comments

There’s a new strain of COVID in the UK – so, what does it mean? — 28 Comments

  1. France, for awhile, shut down lorry traffic from the UK. Huge traffic problem. The UK police have a plan for such emergencies. But I understand multiple countries are considering or have imposed a ban on travelers from the UK. There are calls for the US to institute a ban also.

    Yes, being so very synclinal now, I would not put it past the dictators to use it to impose more bans. And mask wearing until Doomsday.

  2. Virus’s mutate all the time. Normally sober professionals would point this out but in the age of Oprah safety-ism we must all panic. What a crock. Life is a set of calculated risk. Many people now knowing what we do know now would take that risk to get back to life with some normal precautions.

    This will go on until people look around and realize that they are being fed a line of bull. If the ones who set the rules don’t obey them, then they don’t believe them. There is another study showing mask wearing outside a medical setting is useless. When the people of the blue states see how red state people are living well then the realization will come that their pain and suffering really isn’t making a difference. It all comes down to population density in an area. Always has and always will. That is why people fled the cities for the countryside during plagues.

    https://townhall.com/columnists/scottmorefield/2020/12/21/new-study-shows-mask-mandates-had-zero-effect-in-florida-or-nationwide-but-the-l-n2581879

    https://rationalground.com/post-thanksgiving-mask-charts-still-no-evidence-that-masks-work/

    Lots of activity with a Recall Whitmer initiative here in Michigan. I signed it. If she keeps schools shut through all of winter there will be enough signatures to call an election. She would lose.

  3. Have to find something to keep it alive. King Jay of Washington has issued orders on travelers from the UK and South Africa. It’s to the point where it’s good news when one his ‘briefings’ spares us and punishes the ‘other’.

  5. Well, it’s a virus and they mutate, some slow and and some fast. Some viruses like mumps barely mutate and some like the flu mutate continually and you need a new vaccine every year.

  6. Off topic but relevant. Our lawmakers at work for us. See what the stimulus bill funds in emergency COVID relief. Use this with your Democratic colleagues and ask them were these items worth holding up during the whole summer, relief for minority Americans who are disproportionally impacted by the lack of stimulus support. Add as an aside that Trump wanted to sign a clean $1200 check to all Americans. Ask them, so based on these two data points, whose plan was best for the working man and woman. Ask for answer and don’t let them deflect. Keep coming back to it and see their cognitive dissidence at work.

    https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1341117320572366854.html

    People wonder what the $1.4B Asia Reassurance Initiative Act is. I tell them that is the fund that Hunter will run since he is the smartest man Joe Biden knows.

    https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/12/democrats-stimulus-bill-gives-600-suffering-americans-sends-2-billion-africa-asia/

  7. When I saw this morning in the Daily Mail site, my first thought was, “Here we go! Can’t let a vaccine take away the fear and thus, the politician’s power.” They will keep rolling out new virus strains, and when that starts to fail, they are already getting the old bugaboo climate change cranked back up.

  8. physicsguy,

    Their old friend ‘long haul covid’ is always available when things start looking better.

    Notice how they no longer harp on the Dakotas? That’s because they and the rest of the upper Midwest peaked in November and have dropped off since then. It has followed the exact same pattern virtually everywhere regardless of masks, lockdowns, etc. but they never acknowledge that.

  9. From a research paper in March 2020.

    Population genetic analyses of 103 SARS-CoV-2 genomes indicated that these viruses had two major lineages (designated L and S), that are well defined by two different SNPs that show nearly complete linkage across the viral strains sequenced to date. We found that L lineage was more prevalent than the S lineage within the limited patient samples we examined. The implication of these evolutionary changes on disease etiology remains unclear.

    This is from Aug. 2020.

    The original strain found in China when Covid-19 first emerged in January was dubbed D614.

    G614 – often referred to as the “G strain” – is a mutated variant which was prevalent across Europe and North America by May. This strain has been more virulent – infecting more people and has been found in more places – than the original one.

    Researchers say there is another strain now, D614G, that is even more prevalent in the world. This is the one that the Malaysian health authorities on Sunday described as 10 times more infectious. Some scientists claim the D614G variant has been circulating in South-east Asia as early as February.

    Lineage descriptors and strain identifiers. Blah, blah, more transmissible; blah, blah. Old news, but this new one is the first identified in the U.K.! Be very afraid!

  10. I think there’s a real problem in the UK. The hospital census had been declining. It’s increased from 12,000 and change to 17,000 and change since 5 December. Not reflected in deaths as yet, however.

  11. Yes, the hospitalizations in my CA county has about doubled in the last month. Something is happening. It could be just winter conditions or continuing immigration from Mexico and Central America during unfavorable winter months. Or maybe it is covid controls compliance fatigue. Or, or, … The CDC will never tell.

  12. When I read that this new strain was 40-60% more easily transmissible, I was quite confused. I thought the covid that has been with us since 2019 was notorious for it’s ease of transmission. Is the new strain extra extraordinarily transmissible? And will the next be extra, extra transmissible to the 10th power?

  13. Spartacus:

    “When the people of the blue states see how red state people are living well then the realization will come that their pain and suffering really isn’t making a difference.”

    I believe that many blue state people see the lockdowns and masks as an opportunity to demonstrate their superior virtue, and the more pain and suffering they endure, why, the more proof of the sanctity of their virtue.

  14. In a sane world the current situation in California would give pause to the zealots but no. They have done everything the nutjobs demand for going on 9 months now. Masks, masks, masks they have killed countless small businesses, have caused billions of dollars in economic damage closed theme parks, driven sports teams out of state and it’s worse there than ever but no signs of introspection just harder lockdowns and more restrictions.

  15. I am Sparticus,

    Re:“Ask for answer and don’t let them deflect. Keep coming back to it and see their cognitive dissidence at work.”

    Absent serious mental impairment, cognitive dissonance is the resultant condition when willful blindness is confronted. It’s been my experience that confrontation leads to either flight or flight but in neither case is persuasion a consequence. When cognitive dissonance arises, the individual’s investment in a set of beliefs has been challenged and the dissonance indicates that the individual is unable to rationally consider the contrary information. Arguably, it is a mild form of mental impairment.

    Griffin,

    Facts that contradict and threaten to invalidate the narrative are never acknowledged. That’s because as red diaper baby David Horowitz turned conservative observed, “”The ‘issue’ is never the issue. The [actual] issue is always the revolution.”

    Clearly and obviously, that also applies to Commiefornia.

  16. Seems to me Griffin you describe with some precision just what H. L. Mencken meant by “good and hard”.

  18. Captain Rusty – “I believe that many blue state people see the lockdowns and masks as an opportunity to demonstrate their superior virtue, and the more pain and suffering they endure, why, the more proof of the sanctity of their virtue.”

    I believe that for the credentialed class they see it as an opportunity to inflict more pain and suffering to OTHER people because they have never missed a paycheck. They have not had to make decisions on how to pay for something or are able to work at home. So they feel virtuous because they think they too are suffering. Now start cutting salaries and only allow deliveries to their doors and see how their attitudes change. Suddenly virtuousness hurts. Imagine teachers taking a 50% pay cut teaching zoom classes. You will see agitation to get schools open ASAP because Europe has shown it can be done safely.

    One other thing I have observed here in Michigan is the degree of risk people are willing to take even with all the facts in hand. People I thought would be more calculating are huddling in place while others I never imagined would be out and about are doing so. It really is interesting to observe and see. I don’t place value judgements on anybody but I do find it illuminating about human nature.

  19. I think I had it, maybe twice, and knowing me, I’ll get it again. But whatever the score, it doesn’t matter, I want to die free.

  20. Geoffrey @ 10:25 – Change is a process and not a moment. In order for the process to move along you have to bring a dissident fact into the equation which at the time they can dismiss but it will be there. Then as other facts appear then it becomes a mosaic of a different world view. For example with my Brother in Law where we had a discussion before his mom died of COVID he trots out the tired trope of Trump is a racist and I counter with the Second Chance Act which undid the Biden 1994 Crime Bill, long term funding for Historical Black Colleges and lowest unemployment rates for minorities. Coupled with how he got higher share of the minority vote in 2016 how is that racist….or are minorities just stupid. He came back with the Charlottesville speech which I asked him to listen but he will not. But he knows now he doesn’t have a good response to my facts. It is a process and not a moment.

    I am thinking of taking out my bullet points I posted in October and updating it and re-posting it so to have something available for people to use.

  22. Vincent Racaniello at Columbia University School of Medicine — host of The post cast TWiV, This Week in Virology, and who teaches the subject to undergrads — has a rejoinder to this alarming claim about this new variant up at YouTube: he’s unpersuaded because he rejects two of the three claims made by this committee.

    In particular, they rely on PCR to detect its spread, and this tool is too dodgy. Thus, in place of their Moderate Confidence judgement in the report, VR thinks Low Confidence is the better estimate. And he repeats my thinking, saying that other variants haven’t been too different from the original one, and that this one is still likely to not be more transmissible than they claim.

    Stop the fear, on with vaccinations, he says.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wC8ObD2W4Rk

    It is a variant, but not a new strain.

    Skip to the last six or so minutes when you tire from his technical detailed exposition.

  23. “I would bet a large amount of money that most people who have heard of this virus have not heard the news that it may not be more transmittable, it almost certainly is not more virulent, and the vaccine should remain effective against it.” – Neo

    The typical news story has, from time immemorial, used the inverted pyramid structure, in which the reported “facts” (isn’t it a shame we have to use sarc quotes now?) are introduced to the reader in such a fashion that the most important information comes first (A,B,C), then are subsequently developed with additional secondary information (A’, B’, C’) and possibly even tertiary additions.

    This was done so that, when the story was set up in type and positioned on the page, the compositor or editor could simply start deleting paragraphs from the bottom up as necessary to fit the space allotted, without losing the most salient reporting. The secondary consequence was that the casual or skimming readers get the said saliency without having to go through the entire story, in which they may not have much interest.*

    That so often the facts of a story are now at the tail of the report, and the “facts” at the top, shows you what the publisher thinks is important for you to know.

    *(Old-style newspapers were quite hefty back in the day; I used to tell the sales people that I refused to subscribe because, as a compulsive reader, I would have to read the whole thing and I just didn’t have the time. Most of them did not understand.)

  24. Again I wish I could post some graphs here. Anyway, something interesting is happening in the data. For the last 28 days the number of new active cases has been flat at about 95k. Prior to that the number was accelerating. In more technical terms, the second derivative was very positive up to about a month ago, and now the second derivative is zero.

    More importantly, the percentage of serious cases of active cases continues to decline even as the number of active cases now greatly exceeds the summer surge and the spring surge combined. It now stands at 0.35%. In April it was over 3%. And each day it goes down a bit more. This is reflected in some of the state’s death numbers. For example, Georgia now far exceeds its previous summer case number, but the deaths have remained constant at about 25/day. In the summer it was close to 80/day.

    Of course, none of these possible positive news nuances will ever be reported.

  25. I’m hoping that the new mRNA vaccine technology will let us modify vaccines faster and better as viruses inevitably shift. In the meantime, it’s starting to sound as though the theory for the “new” strain is largely a matter of computer modeling, which means we’d do well to wait for some more solid analysis. Clearly there’s no physical evidence for an increased risk of serious illness or vaccine resistance. If the virus is in fact getting more transmissible, at most it should emphasize the need to get the vaccination program moving as quickly as possible.

  26. Isn’t this what viruses do? Mutate to less lethal, more contagious? If they didn’t they would kill their host population. Hey – herd immunity is just around the corner.

  27. Where are the knowledgeable medical/science people to put all this garbage into perspective? Most who test positive have no live virus in their bodies. Why do we consider them “cases”? The stupid is off the chart.

    Science has wrecked itself this year. It’s been broken for a couple of decades and this year it has been exposed as corrupt and incompetent. I certainly can’t imagine any sane, rational person simply accepting any scientific pronouncement (regardless of the source).

    Of course, just about every other institution has been similarly exposed. “Expert” is becoming a term to be laughed at.

  28. I’ve been unable to find authoritative sources who agree with this UK committee who believe this variant of Covid is actually more infectious.

    Instead, Racaniello (ABOVE) thinks this is under supported. As does mathematician Nic Lewis turned science analyst and critic.

    The latter finds the UK folks making similar claims about a variant reported in August that failed, as well as a paper in Nature (appearing in October) that assessed similar claims on three Covid variants, finding them all lacking in evidence for increased transmissibility.

    While we await a new evaluation from the UK on their accumulating evidence, we may benefit from the release of finer grained data from the UK, says Lewis. But they don’t appear to be forthcoming.

    Pity that, given that the alarms going off now might be unnecessary.
    https://judithcurry.com/2020/12/29/the-relative-infectivity-of-the-new-uk-variant-of-sars-cov-2/

    EXCERPT from conclusion:

    There is no evidence to date that B.1.1.7 is any more any virulent than existing strains, nor that it will be resistant to the vaccines that have been developed. Expert opinion appears to be that neither of these are likely to be the case.[34]

    These findings imply that B.1.1.7 does not currently appear to represent a serious increase in the menace posed by SARS-CoV-2, even in the worst case that its higher observed growth rate is entirely due to increased transmissibility. In the best case, its higher growth rate will turn out not to spring to any extent from increased transmissibility, as now appears to be the case with the G clade and 20A.EU1 variant.

    Accordingly, it is difficult to see that imposing drastic measures to slow transmission, further reducing economic activity, social activity and peoples freedom, are justified by the current evidence regarding the emerging B.1.1.7 lineage.

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