Muh Muh Muh My Corona (virus)

750 and six hours, IIRC.

 

Denmark is sequencing all coronavirus samples and has an alarming view of the U.K. variant

https://www.washingtonpost.com/worl...faf420-5453-11eb-acc5-92d2819a1ccb_story.html


"Like a speeding car whose brake lines have been cut, the coronavirus variant first spotted in Britain is spreading at an alarming rate and isn’t responding to established ways of slowing the pandemic, according to Danish scientists who have one of the world’s best views into the new, more contagious strain.

Cases involving the variant are increasing 70 percent a week in Denmark, despite a strict lockdown, according to Denmark’s State Serum Institute, a government agency that tracks diseases and advises health policy.

“We’re losing some of the tools that we have to control the epidemic,” said Tyra Grove Krause, scientific director of the institute, which this past week began sequencing every positive coronavirus test to check for mutations. By contrast, the United States is sequencing 0.3 percent of cases, ranking it 43rd in the world and leaving it largely blind to the variant’s spread."

 

Glad it’s done and that they provided options.

 

Thanks. I didn’t know the specifics and I apparently Googled incorrectly in trying to find an answer.

 

COVID in the US is in an absolute freefall. We have a long way to go because of how horrible it got in December, but the speed at which it's dropping is amazing.

Hospital census dropped by 3% just from yesterday to today, and is now down 12.3% from its apparent peak on Jan. 6.

7-day rolling average for cases (covidtracking.com) is down from ~250,000 to under 180,000 in the same two weeks.

Meanwhile, vaccinations are speeding up and we've been over 1 million doses reported easily each of the last three days.

 

Just as a way to frame it, hospital census dropped by more than 3,600 from yesterday to today (Friday historically is a little higher than Thursday, so it's not a day-of-the-week effect). If it dropped by that much every day, we would have zero covid hospitalizations by Feb. 23.

 

Mr. Stain, what are we to think of the upthread news on the latest strains, e.g. mortality, speed of spread and resistance to measures that would prevent spread?

 

OK, here's the overview. I've been reading as much as I possibly can about the mutation and strains and such.

First, people are freaking the fuck out because the media is fearmongering and the governments don't mind nudging that fear along because it will hopefully improve people's behavior. A lot of these headlines are being driven by extremely preliminary data and abusing words like "could" and "may."

I feel like people only have two buckets for news right now. "Good news, everything will be exactly like it was pre-covid soon" or "Bad news, things stay exactly like this forever." The mutations we're detecting are bad news, but they don't mean things will stay like this forever.

There's two separate issues with mutations: Increased transmissibility and immune escape.

It appears likely, although not certain, that the UK variant is more transmissible. The latest data I've seen says about 30% more transmissible (although the latest latest data I saw from today just from the last week already shows that the variant's share in the UK is shrinking instead of growing, so maybe not more transmissible at all?).

For the US, a strain that is 30% more transmissible would be annoying and would be a speedbump on our recovery, but it would not stop it from happening. I've seen estimates that it would take 6-10 weeks for the UK variant to become the dominant strain of US covid. But we are also shrinking our susceptible pool through vaccinations and immunity by about 3% each week, so by the time that 10 week counter is up, we should have already cancelled out the 30% gain. So if cases are shrinking now (they are), they'll continue to shrink then. Just not as fast as they would have without it.

The CDC put out some modeling last week saying exactly that: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/pdfs/mm7003e2-H.pdf

If you go to the page marked 98, they have some graphs about what spread should look like under various assumptions, and as long as we're still vaccinating, the UK variant doesn't stop cases from dropping from here on out.

OK, the second issue, immune escape. This one is kind of complicated. It sounds *terrifying* as if the virus is going to completely make all our previous infections and the vaccines moot and we start back at 0 where we were 16 months ago and live it all out again.

That's not going to happen. It doesn't mean that.

So when the body has an immune response to a disease, one of the best weapons (but not the only weapon) the body has is antibodies, which are little pieces that attach to the virus and change its shape, and the shape is how the virus interacts with cells. The best antibodies are called "neutralizing" because they stop the virus from doing its thing entirely. There's other antibodies that can also slow down the virus by simply attaching themselves to it and signaling other parts of the immune system to come take care of it.

They took blood samples from people who recovered from COVID hospitalization early in the pandemic and put some of the SA variant in them. The neutralizing antibodies were less likely to recognize the virus and bind to it, like they did the original variant. That's not great. But, here's a lot of reasons why it isn't that bad:

1) The non-neutralizing antibodies still recognized it and attached, meaning the immune system would still have some defenses
2) The blood samples were from hospitalized patients, who on average would have a less robust antibody response than people who didn't need hospitalization. That's why they ended up in the hospital, their immune system was struggling.
3) Living immune systems continue to refine and adapt their antibodies even after the infection is over. Months after you recover, your body is still tinkering and fiddling with the antibodies it created to make them more varied, and that didn't have a chance to happen in the blood samples.
4) Immune systems react much more strongly to vaccines than they do live virus, by design, so vaccinated people would have an even stronger response that is likely to create more varied antibodies and handle the variant.

So in conclusion, it's not impossible that the variants emerging could have *some* effect on how good the vaccine or our previous immunity works, but it's likely to be a very small effect. It's about as likely to evolve to evade immunity entirely as it is to evolve to give us all superhero powers. We have to say it "could" because it hasn't been studied to prove it won't, but it's not something anyone with knowledge expects to happen.

But a slightly less effective vaccine is still bad news. A few percent less efficacy doesn't mean the pandemic doesn't end, but over the size of the pandemic around the globe, it could mean 10s of thousands of people die that wouldn't have died otherwise.

 

Thank you for the thorough explanation in language we can understand. You should be the SJ.com Poster of the Year. Admittedly the Denmark view grabbed my attention.

 

If it turns out to be as bad as the Denmark article, then that's a little worse and could prolong the pandemic in the US by a month or two. But that's just one set of data. Not everyone who has a 13-for-32 week is gonna turn out to be a .400 hitter.

 

But the important question: Does a change of handles mean you have to buy beers like a noob?

 

A Michigan marijuana dispensary is offering a free joint to anyone who gets a Covid-19 vaccine - CNN

Pot for Shots.