update Jan 28
The culture of denial and the selective disclosure of information to protect us and serve selfish ends. We are all in a PTSD trance.
Coronavirus updates: World caught in ‘pandemic paradox,’ a race between virus variants and vaccines, WHO says.
I said this recently over and over again. The crux of the today's failed vaccination strategy goes like this. This is the greatest failure of a vaccination program in history. We just didn't go big enough. I don't know how many mega vaccine manufacturing facilities we have in the USA. This will give you the scale of this. Lets say we have five vaccination production facilities in the USA. We should have built 50 or more facilities. The vaccine production capabilities should have been sized to vaccinate everyone in the USA in one month. Big deal we had an excess of five facilities. In these unstable and crisis times, there is really no penalty for going too big. Big deal your are throwing a few pennies down the toilet. If you go too small, hundreds of thousand of human lives will be lost.
update Dec 20
This variant has been around for six months. We are deep into the culture of denial. It is all over the place including the USA, albeit at very low levels. Countries are beginning to close themselves off to each other over this mutant strain. The cat has long gone out of the bag!
Where is the call to stop all air flights from England and Europe? Trump will never do it on his own!
"Israel bans visitors from the UK, Denmark, S. Africa due to new strain"
"We need to close the whole world immediately," Netanyahu said in a cabinet meeting.
For some reason, Covid is beginning to mass mutate and it is going in the wrong way.
"Israelis may be infected with new coronavirus strain from Denmark minks"
*There are most likely a lot of mutations we don’t yet know about because most of the world doesn’t consistently survey and track the mutation,” he said. “We place the focus on Britain, because that’s where the reports are coming from, but this is probably a universal issue,” Moran-Gilad said.
It is almost like we got the virus of self defeating behavior?
"Londoners flee capital ahead of tougher Covid-19 restrictions that came into force on Sunday"
Italy banded fights.
Biden needs to publicly talk about this today if he knows what is good for us
We traditionally with Covid, have been two weeks to a month behind Europe.
How about the California covid spike, is this the new variant? I doubt we have been testing for the mutation?
BBC news is filled with the variant news.
Can you even imagine the air traffic from the mega-financial centers of London and New York City?
WHO: England’s new Covid-19 variant picked up in Denmark, the Netherlands, Australia
“It is of concern that the virus is spreading and that it has so many mutations,” she said.
Has the testing capabilities in the USA advanced enough to detect specific mutation and variants? Are we intentionally not testing in the USA.
***This is set to explode in the USA.
We should do widespread testing in the USA to see what the extent of this new strain is the USA.
This strain is seventy percent more infectious. The official have no idea if this will make vaccinations less effective.
The officials should put this in a Covid infection model to anticipate how this will effect the USA.
One has to ask if the covid virus collectively is mutating much more frequently and will it get much more fatal?
A paper about the new variant identified in England has been published by genomics researchers who say that the first two samples were recorded on September 20 in Kent...
I call this a coverup in the USA.
We do not know if this is medical, pandemic or political response.
This response seen by this official seems way out of the bounds by these rest of the world: A member of the White House coronavirus task force questioned the danger of the coronavirus mutations that helped trigger the London lockdown and said vaccines should be effective against it.
“We don’t know that it’s more dangerous, and very importantly we have not seen a single mutation yet that would make it evade the vaccine,” Assistant Secretary for Health Admiral Brett Giroir said on ABC’s “This Week.”
“We don’t know that it’s more dangerous, and very importantly we have not seen a single mutation yet that would make it evade the vaccine,” Assistant Secretary for Health Admiral Brett Giroir said on ABC’s “This Week.”
Preliminary genomic characterisation of an emergent SARS-CoV-2 lineage in the UK defined by a novel set of spike mutations
Report written by: Andrew Rambaut1, Nick Loman2, Oliver Pybus3, Wendy Barclay4, Jeff Barrett5, Alesandro Carabelli6, Tom Connor7, Tom Peacock4, David L Robertson8, Erik Volz4, on behalf of COVID-19 Genomics Consortium UK (CoG-UK)9.
- University of Edinburgh
- University of Birmingham
- University of Oxford
- Imperial College London
- Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute
- University of Cambridge
- Cardiff University
- MRC-University of Glasgow Centre for Virus Research
- https://www.cogconsortium.uk 279
Summary
Recently a distinct phylogenetic cluster (named lineage B.1.1.7) was detected within the COG-UK surveillance dataset. This cluster has been growing rapidly over the past 4 weeks and since been observed in other UK locations, indicating further spread.
Several aspects of this cluster are noteworthy for epidemiological and biological reasons and we report preliminary findings below. In summary:
The B.1.1.7 lineage accounts for an increasing proportion of cases in parts of England. The number of B.1.1.7 cases, and the number of regions reporting B.1.1.7 infections, are growing.
B.1.1.7 has an unusually large number of genetic changes, particularly in the spike protein.
Three of these mutations have potential biological effects that have been described previously to varying extents:
Britain Sounds Alarm About Mutant Coronavirus Strain
By Jamie Dettmer
Updated December 19, 2020 03:11 PM
British scientists were scrambling Saturday to work out whether a mutant strain of the coronavirus, which has been spreading rapidly in England this month, may be resistant to the crop of newly developed vaccines.
The strain was first identified on December 13 in the county of Kent in southern England, and initial analysis by government scientists suggested it is “growing faster than the existing variants.”
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson held an unscheduled meeting of ministers Friday amid mounting alarm about the threat posed by the mutant strain, which has been named VUI-202012/01. Johnson said at a press conference Saturday that there was no evidence so far to suggest vaccines would be any less effective against the new strain, but he added that “there is still much we don’t know.”
He noted the new strain was up to 70% more transmissible than prior strains.
The British leader announced a virtual lockdown for London and the southeast of England, with people urged to stay at home. All nonessential stores are now to close, and people should not enter or leave the British capital or large parts of southeast of England.
“We can’t continue with Christmas as planned,” said Johnson, noting that a previously announced relaxation of rules for the holidays would be reversed. In London and southern England, households now can’t mix to celebrate Christmas. Elsewhere in the country, up to three households can mix but only for Christmas Day itself.
“I must stress how complicated it is to work out, in a situation where things might be growing for other reasons, to really put your finger on that it’s actually the virus that is doing it, but the evidence is pointing in that direction,” Ewan Birney, deputy director of the European Molecular Biological Laboratory, told the BBC.
Midweek, Health Minister Matt Hancock said the new strain might be associated with the faster transmission of the virus in the southeast of England and London, but there was “nothing to suggest” it caused a worse disease, or that it might be resistant to vaccines that have only just received approval in Britain and the U.S.
England’s chief medical officer, Chris Whitty, said Britain had alerted the World Health Organization about the fast transmissibility of the variant strain.
“There is no current evidence to suggest the new strain causes a higher mortality rate or that it affects vaccines and treatments, although urgent work is under way to confirm this,” he said in a statement.
Jeremy Farrar, a government adviser and director of the Wellcome Trust, Britain's largest medical research endowment, warned Saturday of his concern. He tweeted: “The new strain of COVID-19 is worrying & real cause for concern & extra caution. Research is ongoing to understand more but acting urgently now is critical. There is no part of the UK & globally that should not be concerned. As in many countries, the situation is fragile.”
Johnson also held emergency talks with the first ministers of Britain’s devolved governments in Scotland and Wales. “I attended a four-nation call earlier today to discuss serious concerns over the spread of a new COVID variant,” Welsh First Minister Mark Drakeford tweeted.
Scotland’s first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, said that she would be holding discussions with her cabinet following the four-nation talks and that “preventative action may be necessary” to curb the spread of the new strain.
The new variant includes up to 23 changes, including with the spike protein, which the virus uses to enter human cells that allow it to replicate. There have been many mutations in the virus since it emerged last year in Wuhan, China, with 4,000 mutations in the spike protein alone. Virologists say most mutations are insignificant and are part of the expected evolution of the virus, but some may lead to more efficient transmission.
According to the government’s scientific advisers, the new strain is fast becoming the dominant strain, and they said it might be present in other countries.
“Scientists are working extremely hard to work out what is going on,” Mark Walport, a member of the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, told The Times newspaper.
"But it does definitely seem possible that this transmits more easily. It will make the social distancing even more critical,” he added.
Government scientists said it could take two weeks to establish how the new strain reacts to vaccines, but virologists were hoping that the changes wouldn't diminish the efficacy of vaccines, which are designed to produce antibodies against many different parts of the spike protein.
Hospitals in England are seeing a record number of patients suffering from COVID-19, the disease triggered by the coronavirus. About 38 million people in England already were under tough coronavirus restrictions before Saturday’s announcement. The new measures amount to a virtual lockdown, something Johnson had said just a few days ago he would do everything to avoid.
Johnson’s decision to cancel Christmas for much of England prompted the fury of some lawmakers from his ruling Conservative Party. Many have fulminated for weeks against what they see as heavy-handed government and a lack of parliamentary oversight.
“The changes must be put to a vote on the Commons at the earliest opportunity,” said Mark Harper, chairman of the COVID Recovery Group of Tory MPs who have criticized government handling of the pandemic.
Keir Starmer, leader of the main opposition party, Labour, accused Johnson of indecisiveness. He had been calling for tougher restrictions for weeks and had warned against relaxing Christmas rules.
“Millions of families across the country are going to be heartbroken by this news — having their Christmas plans ripped up. And I'm really frustrated because I raised this with the prime minister on Wednesday and he dismissed that and went on to tell people to have a merry little Christmas, only three days later to rip up their plans,” Starmer told British broadcasters.
British health authorities announced a further 27,052 confirmed cases of infection across Britain on Saturday and 534 more fatalities.
In all, 66,541 Britons have died from COVID-19, just 4,500 short of the total British civilian death toll in the Second World War.
No comments:
Post a Comment