https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-697/
Any biological differences are theorized solely from the genome at this point. In the episode, Racaniello is at pains to point out that genomic differences alone don't imply biological differences in say transmission, and things like founder effects might also explain the variant's prevalance. We simply don't know yet.
There's a neat cautionary example at 35:10 which I'll try to summarize here. Polio was endemic, with low incidence, for thousands of years. Around 1900 it went from endemic to epidemic. Why? Did it suddenly mutate into a deadlier or more transmissable strain? While we don't have polio sequences from before and after 1900 to compare, we do know that rapid improvements in sanitation delayed exposure to the polio virus. Babies were now encountering the virus after maternal antibodies to it had waned! And it turns out this adequately explains the spike in polio a century ago.
Goes to show how complex the dynamics of these systems can be!
The problem is that action now is way more valuable than action in 1-2 months. Mass vaccination is right around the corner, we just need to buy time to get there. If there is a substantially more transmissive variant around, that will make it much harder to buy that time. You need to be able to act on the balance of probabilities, not wait for perfect information.
(And their claim that there's nothing we can do differently is just total bunk.)
And because they run a popular podcast, their view gets massively amplified by being parroted in internet discussion.
I definitely don't know enough about this topic to say you're right, but as an avid layman listener of TWIV for 8+ months now, I've recently started thinking along the same lines.
With the greatest of respect, Vincent Racaniello, while being clearly a true expert in the field, tends to take a very quick and polarised view to newly presented evidence, and can often sound like he's being overly dismissive to my layman's ears. To the degree where I end up thinking, "it can't be that black and white".
I get the sense that sometimes the co-hosts would likely go for a more nuanced perspective, and often they do try to soften the edges around some of his opinions, but the podcast is very much his domain.
By the same token, I've often heard him admit that he was wrong. The sign of a good scientist! So there's that.
Being in the UK, and having received head-on the full barrage of "communication" from our Government during COVID, I have learnt to be sceptical of the messages they put out, and defaulted to "cynical" when first hearing their report of the new variant at the end of a recent press conference. The more time goes on though, the evidence does seem to be mounting that we should be looking at this very closely and not dismissing it out of hand.
> The problem is that action now is way more valuable than action in 1-2 months.
Completely agree. We have to use a balance here of scientific evidence, but also strategic thinking - which may not be 100% scientific - and the strategy may be that it's safer to assume this variant is more easily transmissible, and act accordingly, rather than wait for the science to catch up and prove it 100%.
All of that said, re. TWIV - it has been a game-changer of a podcast for me during this pandemic. I thoroughly enjoy listening to the hosts, all of whom are generally good natured, clearly very experienced, and doing a good job overall of science communication. No view on COVID is going to be perfect, and in my view their output is a net positive (by far) even despite the above.
What you describe is one such example. TWiV suggests that anything short of convincing proof should be ignored. However, every bit of evidence updates our individual confidence to some extent. It's quite silly to draw an arbitrary line at a certain "quality" of evidence, and treat anything below that line as useless.
I suspect that in an effort to debunk unreasonable and sensational stories in the media, TWiV got carried away, and started to sweep the subtleties under the carpet.
It seems these days, it's really hard to find highly nuanced, carefully balanced, sources of information.
By current accounts the vaccines will still work against this variant. So the last thing you want to happen is for the virus to catch the vulnerables in the last moment before they are vaccinated and essentially renders the whole vaccination program ineffective.
Of course there's the debate of this whole pandemic about the harm to economy and people's lives etc. To me the majority of the damage has already been done and can't be undone. So I'd like the measures to be taken to end this ASAP, even if they are even stricter, and to mitigate the harm as much as possible. But I highly doubt that's what's going to happen. The actual policy effects may be neither here nor there.
But which action? I can see two class of possible cause that do not entirely overlap in response: A singular cause such as a strain; or fluctuations as the emergent behavior of a complex dynamic system. If incorrectly attributed to a localised strain, efforts may be ineffectively focused on creating division between larger populations while removing the public's focus on the more evenly distributed measures we are already employing.
> You need to be able to act on the balance of probabilities, not wait for perfect information.
How about the probabilities between the two class of above cause? We seem to have an innate bias towards inferring 1:1 causal relationships which makes a strain feel like a simple and attractive explanation. This bias fails miserably in the face of dynamic systems where behavior cannot usually be attributed to a single variable... IANAV, but the spread of infectious disease is without a doubt a complex dynamic system from which a significant degree of unpredictable behavior must emerge.
To be honest this problem is not even particularly unique to this situation... The world is vast and complex, yet people usually want simple explanations - particularly for undesirable situations, something tangible to blame, a villain... The media continually exploit this desire and I cannot help but feel this is another example. A strain (real or not) makes for an excellent villain and story VS "chaos" which is extremely difficult for any reporter to spin an accessible narrative into.
What is the source for this? I've read another explanation: the overuse of pesticides like Paris Green, DDT (see pictures of kids literally sprayed with it on their clothing), and the use of "medical metals" to treat any kinds of diseases - giving mercury, arsenic etc. All of these (pesticides, metals) can weaken the bowels and allow the polio virus (which resides in the bowels) to enter into the spine where it then causes paralysis.
Maternal transfer of antibodies is one of my favorite immunity topics - it is far overlooked in usefulness lately, largely seen as impractical due to changes in lifestyle (not many mothers breastfeed)
Dear downvoters: what do you find does not contribute to conversation about sharing this theory?
https://twitter.com/billhanage/status/1341857733633581063?s=...
I share your opinion.
https://khub.net/documents/135939561/338928724/SARS-CoV-2+va...
and have a newer one where they're more confident: https://app.box.com/s/3lkcbxepqixkg4mv640dpvvg978ixjtf/file/...
I haven’t seen any work on this variant that doesn’t fall into that trap.
Any adjective like "strain" implies a binary distinction, but that doesn't mean you should round off "don't know" to false.
This is talking about the SARS-CoV-2 VOC 202012/01 variant [0], aka B.1.1.7., aka carrying the N501Y mutation.
No news here, other than confirmed spread to Japan.
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/more/scientific-br...
https://nextstrain.org/groups/neherlab/ncov/S.N501?animate=2...
N50Y has also a similar antibody neutralization profile as the non-mutated version.
Of course, these data refer to the mutations on their own, not together.
More on the deletion (on its own, again): while it is supposedly tied to a faster entry into the cells (twice as efficient in experimental assays), it look like it has lower fitness in absence of an ongoing immune response (it would lower in presence - but not disappear - in the immunocompromised patient it was first found into between treatments with convalescent serum).
We assume the drug companies will be able to adapt the vaccine quickly to the new variants. If this happens then it creates a few problems..
One problem is having to continuously distribute a new vaccine to people indefinitely.
Another problem is only certain countries are capable of manufacturing the vaccine. So you have a kind of supply chain scarcity develop where only certain people in certain countries will be able to get one.
I've seen mixed reports about whether the current vaccine will hold up as variants appear.
Shouldn't these viruses get selectively better at fighting human immune systems? And we're throwing 750.000 new hosts to this virus worldwide every day.
Perhaps this is just the normal operation of American media to exaggerate the negative side of the situation? [2]
[1] https://nextstrain.org/sars-cov-2/
[2] PDF link: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w28110/w281...
Also, the article here says "case count". I'm really interested in the count of "excess deaths".
NYT article on paper: [2]
[1] https://cmmid.github.io/topics/covid19/reports/uk-novel-vari...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/23/health/coronavirus-uk-var...
At least now widespread testing is available and we're able to track new variants in geography and time. Looks like the mutated one mentioned just hit France a couple of days ago.
Presumably you mean 2019?
Assuming we ever get out of them...
In the words of Derek Lowe...
“Many infectious pathogens, in fact, gradually evolve versus a given animal host to be more infectious and less virulent over time. Remember, it’s not the job of a virus to make people deathly ill: it’s the job of a virus to make more virus.”
Ask yourself: if you're that parent, do you wish that your kid had already been exposed and run a complete course of the virus prior to this mutation?
It seems obvious that the answer is 'yes', and, at least to my way of thinking, is an indictment of the purely horizontal approach to pandemic control so far displayed by states.
Is that relevant and who are you?
1. Many times there is an inverse relationship between ease of transmission, and severity of symptoms. There is a good chance that this new more transmissible mutant is likely to make people less sick.
2. So far all the available evidence seems to indicate that the vaccines will be effects against this strain as well.
Mutation and variation are different concepts.
Mutations affect the single organisms. Variations happens between individuals, groups or populations of an organism.
What is going on right now is mass anxiety. The vaccine is out, so humanity is imagining how things could still go wrong. The easiest thing to imagine is a version of the virus that doesn’t respond to antibodies. Luckily, they imagine this because they don’t understand how the vaccine works. It’s fantasy, and it is highly unlikely that any of this would play out.
Sure, spike ain't hemagglutinin and corona ain't no influenza, but let's not pretend there's no precedent at all for proteins mutating to the point that vaccines become ineffective.
Not enough anxiety, in my opinion. Tons and tons of people are still behaving as if everything is normal, or that they are somehow special.
In Spain alone they have 3 different vaccines that are not even in phase 1, but will be next year.
There will be at least 5 totally different technologies against it. There are "slower to market" technologies than RNA but stronger and proven.
Also the weather is going to get better in the North Hemisphere soon.
January is colder than December usually. We're not even over the peak. February should be roughly similar to December, March is when it gets better again usually. But that's still 2 months of people staying indoors a lot.
I came across the nextstrain site [1] in March, where they showed multiple variants in the wild, concentrated to certain regions.
The media is turning this into a bigger deal than it is, else they’ll lose control over the population. Imagine what would happen if there wasn’t constant coverage of the est. case count...life would go back to normal.
This is precisely the world we're in, and which we've been in since the dawn of infectious disease.
Some viruses (in fact, some entire realms of virus) exhibit this phenomenon; they're sharp as hell for things that aren't even a full-fledged organism. But we're sharper, and we make vaccines to account for subtle mutations. Often times, we get it right, which is incredible.
We already do this for influenza.
In virological warfare "that's a feature, not a bug".
I'm sure there are other factors, but that's a big one. So most viruses tend to harm the host less over time.
We saw the opposite effect during the Spanish Flu. As I recall at least one theory: because there was a war on, only severely sick soldiers would get sent away from the front lines, where they could come into contact with the general population. Less severe cases were kept on the front lines. This behavior created an inverse effect, applying selective pressure on more _severe_ strains of the virus. Hence, the second more deadly wave.
Once the Spanish Flu pandemic was "over" and the war was over, that pressure wore off and the Spanish Flu slowly evolved into various common cold strains that we still see today (AFAIK).
My guess is that it's hard to speculate what will happen with COVID-19. Several common cold viruses are coronaviruses, so from that one might conclude that COVID-19 will follow the same path of becoming less severe over time. But COVID-19 also has a _very_ large incidence of asymptomatic transmission. So isolating people who are very sick is unlikely to provide much selective pressure to this virus.
If COVID-19 _does_ become less severe over time, it will occur only because of different selective pressures or for different reasons. For example, maybe the mutations that result in higher transmission also, by some genetic necessity, lower severity.
The asymptomatic nature of COVID-19 gives it a big question mark, and we should _not_ assume anything about it becoming less severe over time. We should keep up aggressive measures to control its spread and lean on our vaccines to squash it before it has a chance to get worse. The quicker we get the vaccine out, and the more aggressive we are about controlling the virus's spread, the higher our chance of getting out of this mess.
Does it? Meta-analysis concluding secondary attack rate in households from asymptomatic transmission around 0.7%.
> Household secondary attack rates were increased from symptomatic index cases (18.0%; 95% CI, 14.2%-22.1%) than from asymptomatic index cases (0.7%; 95% CI, 0%-4.9%)
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
> The asymptomatic nature of COVID-19 gives it a big question mark
Also the mass, un-targeted lockdowns have probably screwed with the selective pressure as well.
So, there are two suggestions within viral genetics:
1. Mutations which are kinder to the immune system might be able to spread relatively easier. As noted in the other comments, this is likely dependent on human behaviour and ritual around illness and death.
2. Significant mutations which spread more efficiently are perhaps more likely to knock-out genes causing harm (lost to 'evolutionary cost') than to enhance those genes.
Neither of these are completely guaranteed, but they are generally seen as likely.
the virus will not become weaker as time goes on, it will have less variation to call upon for evasion of host defenses.
the major selective pressure on this virus appears to be exhaustion of variant production bringing the cat and mouse game of new viral antigen sequence vs antibody respecification to a stalemate, and the virus must move on [spillover] to a new host species. The ability to occur in many novel variations, and eventually spillover from a host species to a conspecific host is how this virus persists.
> Trade-offs between different components of parasite fitness provide the dominant conceptual framework for understanding the adaptive evolution of virulence (Alizon et al. 2009).
...
> By far, the most widely studied trade-off involves transmission and virulence (Anderson and May, 1982; Frank, 1996; Alizon et al. 2009).
But. I have no training.
I remember the scientists telling us early on in the pandemic that mutations typically result in less lethal viruses.
Is this not the case?
If any (will), it shouldn’t be killing its host.
These are anthropomorphic reasoning and antagonisms.
What would you say instead, to capture these ideas, that are equally clear to everyone?
In general, a "weaker" virus has an evolutionary advantage. Killing or disabling the host means fewer opportunities to spread.
So far UK and South Africa have two strains that are faster spreading (and hopefully that's the only difference). If there's nothing special about the one from Japan, I bet that this is just getting attention because the other two are in the news. Either news orgs jumping on a bandwagon or HN readers expecting that it's similar when it's not.
But maybe this one actually is notable too, I don't know.
I’ve just come from the UK, and while rules were less strict for a while, and people weren’t wearing masks as much, I’m less certain if people were social distancing. We certainly were in preparation for travel, but I imagine schools, college holidays, etc contributed just as much as any variant.
[1] https://www.timeslive.co.za/news/south-africa/2020-12-08-130...
1) This is from a Japanese website.
2) Could you point me in the direction of a nation which has media that doesn't over exaggerate things?
Death rate in London and Kent didn't seem very different to other affected areas which would imply that the virus has same severity of symptoms but it is easier to transmit/contract.
We have seen strains quickly accelerate because of founder effect several times in 2020, and particular strains dominate in particular regions. The experimental studies that are needed to confirm a claim of evolutionary advantage have not been done, and the observational evidence is weak.
Those who would panic about this should be just as circumspect in their their claims as those who would dismiss it.
it is worthy of note that one single point mutation in the influenza virus corresponded to high lethality.
https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/j...
>> The 1918 pandemic strain A/Brevig Mission/18 was reconstructed with a pathogenicity-reducing mutation in PB1-F2 (S66N). The resultant 1918 S66N virus was attenuated in mice having a 3-log lower 50% lethal dose and caused less morbidity and mortality in mice than the wild-type virus. Viral lung titers were also decreased in 1918 S66N–infected mice compared with wild-type 1918 virus–infected mice. In addition, both viruses with an S at position 66 (WH N66S and wt 1918) induced elevated levels of cytokines in the lungs of infected mice. Together, these data show that a single amino acid substitution in PB1-F2 can result in increased viral pathogenicity and could be one of the factors contributing to the high lethality seen with the 1918 pandemic virus.<<
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myxomatosis
the coronavirus breaks past this dynamic as there is disjunction between transmission and onset of symptoms. thus morbidity is not a selective pressure upon transmisibility of the coronavirus.
mutation is also a term loaded with connotations due to popular depictions.
sexual reproduction is the mechanism of verticall transmission of variation of genetic sequence through a population. genetic drift is also a mechanism of variation of a population.
the long and short of it is that mutation and variation, are tied together, they are the same thing.
you also seem to have overlooked the abuse of the term mutation, by the original article title, the use of mutation is slicker, than the use of error prone generated variant.
the use of the term strain is also erroneous in this context.
We are tracking these changes closely and concommitantly can change the sequence of mRNA, responsively, and pre-emptively if desired.This isn't surprising because the variant hasn't really encountered the vaccines yet, so it's not an adaptation to them.
strains are signifigantly different from each other, variants are a nuance on the same theme.
the virus strain that infects small mammals is separate from the trans specific strain that spilled over to humans.
the virus with small changes to the spike sequence altering spike structure or function is a variant.
under emergency conditions a 3phase trial is not mandatory , and would likely be a quick deliberation under normal conditions for small adjustments to the sequence, similar to seasonal influenza vaccines.
Well, then it's news because it means that Japan is now going to face, or has been facing, much faster spread than before.
the basis of the lethality and transmissibility are inversely related is dependent upon dead or ill hosts having down time and not interacting with other hosts. thus if you are sick and febrile, you contact fewer individuals thus less opportunity for virus transmission between individuals.
in the case of the coronavirus the dynamic is different. you contact the virus, virus replicates, and becomes transmissible, you still feel fine and behave as always transmitting the virus to other individuals, Then you begin to feel ill and bedridden. the virus has reproduced, transmitted and even if it kills you, it has escaped the selection pressure of the first case, where lethality or morbidity must be decreased for maximization of transmission.
here is a slightly difficult read but is is a classic example of the rule you are asking about.
The error rate is in terms of the number of nucleotides addended to the polymerizing RNA during replication the mutation rate is primarily a result of RNA replication, _not_ time. this means more replication events leads to more "errors", this also means longer sequence has a higher rate of error than a shorter sequence. at a length of ~29k bp the coronavirus sequence is very error prone, so error prone that this is approaching the upper limit of stability.
it seems you are mistaking DNA proofreading for an RNA proofreading mechanism, which happens to be negative selection upon nonfunctional mutant/variant. there is no recognized enzymatic [rdRNApol] error correction associated with the coronavirus.
"the RNA polymerases of RNA viruses are the kings of errors – these enzymes screw up as often as one time for every 1,000 – 100,000 nucleotides polymerized. This high rate of mutation comes from the lack of proofreading ability in RNA polymerases. These enzymes make mistakes, but they can’t correct them. Therefore the mutations remain in the newly synthesized RNA." [0]
none of these error prone generated mutations are surprising, they are to be expected espescially when the virus is given opportunity to replicate at a high cyle rate. this is very much not a surprise, if you are aware of the properties of +ssRNA virus.
[0] https://www.virology.ws/2009/05/10/the-error-prone-ways-of-r...
you may find this interesting[1] however this is primarily post polymerization [RNA readout] modification mechanism not error correction.
But when considering the data - that the strain has grown faster than all others in the UK at the time - the likelihood becomes significant. Not certain, but not worthy of your casual dismissal.
You dismiss their observational evidence as weak, but offer no further analysis. Please do so.
There are literally dozens of strains on nextstrain that have rapidly grown to be the predominant strain in a region. That alone is not a strong indication of anything other than founder effect.
You might be inducing a "so-what" mentality where people don't want to refrain from going to bars and restaurants just to not catch a virus that's going to get them at some point.
Disordered anxiety is reacting when there is no threat.
"Takaki became navy surgeon general in 1885, yet other doctors attacked his theories and questioned his results. The sad result was that while the navy ate barley, the army ate only rice. According to Bay, the use of barley smacked of discredited traditional Japanese medicine to many Western-trained doctors. Plus, recruits were enticed into the army by promises of as much white rice as they could eat."
27 thousand deaths and a decree by the emperor later, and army doctors finally yielded to the evidence.
This is actually not-too-dissimilar to the story of scurvy in European navies in a more distant time. It took a lot of lives and most attempts to alleviate it were based on the totally false theory of humors.
Doctors can be very resistant to change of paradigma. I wonder what is our scurvy or beri-beri; given how fat and diabetic the developed world has grown, maybe nutrition.
In the latest TWIV, their comment was that the things you would do to prevent COVID are the same no matter if it is a new Strain or not. That's true - but we also have to deal with a increasingly uncomfortable truth - in many places, the COVID incident and death rate are pretty much the same, despite dramatically different legal and social dictates around masking, etc. Italy, France, USA, UK, Spain, Belgium, etc are all within 10% of the total death per million population, for example.
There is a weird cycle around COVID. Everyone reports on how awful it is somewhere, people draw a over-broad conclusion about the moral or scientific failures of the continent / state / country / red state / blue state, then that wave of covid waxes in one place, and wanes is another, and the cycle repeats again.
This pattern continues despite different travel restrictions, different masking policies (way less then my state in the USA, for example), etc.
SO I think the answer is not - we couldn't change anything - but rather - what is really the science behind this - and do we truly understand what is going on? I get that Vincent is burned out and has a knee jerk reaction, if I had to deal with all the insanity around the Hydrochloroquine crap I would be too.
1) Act immediately and aggressively at the first sign of potential virus.
2) Get your population used to wearing masks when ill with cold like viruses and thus ensure sufficient supplies and willingness to wear masks when the government mandates it.
3) Preferably be an island or have absolute control of your country (China)
There was a period when countries could've done what Taiwan did but once the virus got a hold in continental europe and usa it was over.
Totally agree on this.
Make a convincing study to disprove them.
That seems weird, to be kind. Source?
That is the single strongest set of data here. In the areas where both the new variant and the older ones can be distinguished (via sequencing or via the fortuitous FN from the commonly used PCR test), the new one is spreading substantially faster. This measurement is not sensitive to confounding factors such as environmental or behavioral changes, because those would affect all variants equally.
The thing that the TWIV guys seem to love repeating is that this is just a founder effect. I just don't understand where they're getting that idea from. Yes, that's almost certainly been the explanation in the earlier cases we had where one variant become predominant. But that happened in low prevalence environments. It's basically inevitable that if there are few cases, one variant or the other will become predominant just by random chance. That was not the case in the UK. In mid-October, when this variant was still basically non-existent, they were at 15k confirmed cases / day. This variant is not a founder, it was a very successful invader.
The other evidence is weaker, because it's less direct and the data is noisier. (Increased viral loads, many of the changes happening in parts of the genome that were already expected to be of biological interest, correlation studies showing that areas where the new variant is predominant have higher growth rates when controlling for other factors). That data would not be conclusive by itself. But all of it is directionally consistent with the main data point of concern, and strengthens the case.
What could explain that data other than increased transmissibility...?
What could explain that data other than increased transmissibility?
Infection rate does not change outcome of recovery (unless it’s resource constrained like vents or meds) and to that point — we’ve walked back the immediacy of vents because they were actually harmful to recovery. So technically the resource management argument should be reduced in weight by some factor.
Actually if you read the meta-analysis I linked, 0.7% secondary attack rate covers both presymptomatic and asymptomatic.
My gut feeling tells me this pandemic is suffering from a similar phenomenon in user interface latency. The research shows that if the latency is under a few hundred milliseconds, we believe that we are in control of the device and our cause and effect matters. However, if the latency is longer than some hundred millisecond mark, we think the device is under someone else’s control and that our cause has no effect on the system — though in fact, it is the direct cause.
To me, a pandemic kinda follows the same thought — if the disease isn’t having a direct, somewhat immediate effect (intuition says a couple days) to our actions, then it’s hard to issue broad, population level behavioral change that comes with direct costs to life and property - it’s just beyond the timeline for us to accept our actions (not wearing a mask or not distancing) as meaningful inputs to the pandemic system.
Personal opinion: I have no trouble wearing a mask even after having covid, but the current gov’t approach is 100% not the way I’d approach this issue. I would approach the mask mandates and business shutdowns this way only if the disease symptoms were severely impacting (so that’s my symptom description with walking a block) a large set of the population (so that’s the 30%, no age brackets needed) — and to me, that number is about 1 in 3. Now the counterpoint to this, is that if there is a tipping point in the proposed pandemic that once it gets to a certain spread, it becomes that 1 in 3 statistic - but I digress, you get the point I believe.
Edit: to tie this all together — there’s a lot of talk about increased sanctions from this new variant — but if the severity of symptoms do not change, only the transmissibility - it is a dangerous seed to sow amongst an already incredulous population.
The undeniable fact is that this variant has successfully replaced other already highly prevalent variants. That needs to be explained somehow.
Could it be a founder effect? No.
Could it be random chance? No. Of course a stochastic process could converge like this even with no selective advantage eventually. But the change has been too fast and too consistent in this case.
Could it be a super-spreading event? No. The change has been continuous, and a single event would cause just a step-change in relative prevalance.
Could it be the new variant being more transmissive, or having another similar selective advantage? Yes.
Could it be an unspecified emergent behavior? I guess it could. But how are we supposed to reason about something that vague? We have a simple explanation that's consistent with the known facts, I feel that anyone proposing that it's just emergent behavior should be at least a little bit more specific.
Sometimes it rains when we predicted it wouldn't, sometimes we get a full blown storm we didn't see coming... And that's using advanced techniques developed over decades on a continually available complex system for which there is demand to be able to predict on a daily basis. The very nature of these things is to have unpredictable behavior... That does not mean we necessarily do not understand the governing rules, but that the emergent behavior is not reducible into a simplified description.
> We have a simple explanation that's consistent with the known facts
It's simple and correlated, but highly suspect when a significant degree of chaos adds massive error bars to the significance of that correlation.
Just how much detail were you hoping for?
In the UK, my view is the action to take was very clearly to dial back the public's expectations of having a 5 day "free for all" period of relaxation of our restrictions over Christmas.
This 5 day period, as originally planned, was going to lead to massive cross-country travel, plenty of it being completely unnecessary, with no doubt a lot of risk taking in the spirit of "it's Christmas" and an inevitable huge spike of cases and deaths in the weeks that followed.
I mean I love Christmas, but I can cope with not having 5 days of partying for just one year... *
As it happens, the government did take action to dial this back at the very last minute to allow just 1 day of relaxed rules (Christmas Day) rather than the week that was originally on the table. In my view they should have been planning for this right from the start and they unnecessarily screwed up a lot of people's Christmas plans by leaving it until the very last minute to make this change.
Now even if the variant turns out to be a "non issue" (and we still have rising numbers anyway), I think it's better that they took this action to further limit Christmas (as tough as it is for everyone) rather than take the "wait and see" or "hope for the best" approach, both of which seem to have been UK govnt strategies at one time or another during 2020.
* I'm being slightly flippant here. This is clearly a tough time for a lot of people, and many families will be spending Christmas apart and will find this very hard for all sorts of reasons.
Honestly, I think people are being incredibly relaxed about the fact that lockdown restrictions are incredibly expensive to the mental health of swathes of the population. I am not claiming that letting covid kill more people would be better - but I wish there was more acknowledgement of the fact that it is a trade off, and that the goal is getting society in the best shape out the other side of this. Not just the largest one.
Systems are dynamic and complex, but that doesn’t make them unknowable. If complex systems were impossible to model science wouldn’t be a thing.
Sure, the “new variant” narrative is an easy one to pick up because it’s superficially understandable; but what other complex interactions are resulting in a new strain becoming dominant over an existing one?
Do we just sit on our hands and go, well gee, better do nothing? Guess it’s just too hard to know what to do at this point...
There is a typical government fallacy that to be seen doing something is better than nothing, even when it’s the wrong thing... I get it, that’s bad.
...but this is a case where doing nothing has been a colossal disaster so far; and it’s extremely clear what the result of doing nothing different will be if the new variant hypothesis is correct.
So it’s a risk game. Is the cost * probability of A vs B a better choice?
You’re saying the probability is not known at this point because systems are complicated.
So what? It’s still clear to me that it’s very likely that something is happening, even if exactly what it is, is unclear.
You can still build a risk matrix taking that into account.
How is this focus "removed" and why is there any reason to think that evenly distributed measures along with targeted ones would be a problem for the public?
Not quite. It can makes them unpredictable, not unknowable... more specifically it can make them computationally irreducible which means we cannot find a simplified description of their behavior without having to compute every step, even when we understand the underlying rules that govern them. In fact we often cannot model them very well, an easy every day example is the weather, which we desperately want to know, but our methods are a significant compromise - that may seem like an unfair analogy but it really isn't, the atoms of society may be fewer but they have far more dimensions and more complex individual interactions.
It doesn't always apply, even within the same medium, it depends on the context e.g predicting weather requires some kind of simulation of fluid and pressure, yet in a different, more narrow context it's not necessary to attempt simulating the underlying mechanisms in any way or form, instead the overall behavior can be simplified to a set of descriptive equations (Bernoulli's).
It's funny because this does touch on a core issue for science - we still mostly hold this traditional view of it based on a history of going after the more easily obtainable nuggets of behavior with nice manageable reducible descriptions, but we have been unwittingly selective.
> what other complex interactions are resulting in a new strain becoming dominant over an existing one?
It does not need to result in a new _variant_, this right here is the misunderstanding. These two things can happen and not be related.
The side points you make are irrelevant to the point at hand; rather than hand waving address the point at hand:
Why is this an excuse to do nothing?
If not, what action do you propose instead?
How do you justify it?
Be specific.
But the people I know kept to the private rules as much or as little as during the first lockdown, which seemed to work despite keeping public transport open. Which would enable similar transmissions as shops and schools.
if schools are open, it's pointless doing anything else. if schools are closed kids will still go out and play.
basically you're screwed if you do and screwed if you don't. and less and less people will listen as time goes on while the virus mutates and selects for contagious variants.
No country has been dealing better with Covid than Taiwan. No lockdown, and > 200 days without new Covid case [1]. Taipei had daily direct flights from Wuhan, and the Diamond Princess mooring near Taipei. They told the world early on [2] how they did it. Summary: Border closure, contract tracing, testing and controlled quarantine for those testing positive. It's worth reading [2] to realise how swiftly, decisively and rationally Taiwan reacted, and compare it with other countries. It probably helped having had an epidemiologist as vice-president [3].
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/29/taiwan-domesti...
[2] C. Y. Wang, C. Y. Ng, R. H. Brook, Response to COVID-19 in Taiwan: Big Data Analytics, New Technology, and Proactive Testing, https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2762689
- It is an island
- It has an effective, well centralized surveillance network
- It has (presumably) an obedient population, or at least, one that don't think personal freedom includes the right to spread the disease
- They were well prepared thanks to the their experience with SARS
- A good enough welfare system to allow people to quarantine without starving or getting ruined
- A good enough police force to make sure they stay quarantined
- Enough masks and hand sanitizer, with domestic production
This is pretty much the opposite of the US. Which is highly connected, with a loosely connected government that has little control over the private sector that runs the country and a highly individualistic population.
Also, maybe there are some populations that just do better for a mix of reasons: climate, race (genetics), culture, average age, health and population density,...
Final note: closing borders is only effective if you contained the epidemic and others didn't.
Taiwanese people aren’t obedient. You should see how they drive.
They wear masks without flaking out about it as slavery or being against their will or whatever nonsense you guys are on about back home in the west.
Taiwanese people are couch potatoes and extremely reserved. They don’t really want to meet new people or hang out with strangers.
Also the government here didn’t play games in the early weeks. No wait and see business as usual lazy bullshit like in the US. They check tour temperature everywhere, mall entrances, restaurants, government buildings.
The us most certainly should copy Taiwan.
Also, most countries still seem to be ignoring the best/cheapest way to control spread via rapid testing and isolation. This has been not only modeled extensively at this point [1][2], but also proven to be effective by sports leagues (NBA, MLB) and Universities (look at where UIUC has kept their numbers vs the state: https://go.illinois.edu/COVIDTestingData )
[1] Larremore, Daniel B, Bryan Wilder, Evan Lester, Soraya Shehata, James M Burke, James A Hay, Milind Tambe, Michael J Mina, and Roy Parker. “Test Sensitivity Is Secondary to Frequency and Turnaround Time for COVID-19 Surveillance.” Preprint. Infectious Diseases (except HIV/AIDS), June 25, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.06.22.20136309.
[2] Atkeson, Andrew, Michael C. Droste, Michael Mina, and James H. Stock. “Economic Benefits of COVID-19 Screening Tests.” National Bureau of Economic Research, November 2, 2020. https://doi.org/10.3386/w28031.
However now there seem to be so many diffuse infection events and undetected chains that the question is more about how to regain control. I'm not sure how this is achievable without contact restrictions.
And, of course, China has more land borders than any other country in the world, and it's managed to engineer the most drastic turnaround of any country in the world.
Having a small number of entry points is useful to limit initial inoculations, but internal policy and cultural cohesion are key for preventing the explosion of any successful inoculation into national disaster, regardless of a polity's geography.
(Ok, Singapore technically is an island but it's connected to Malaysia by the world's busiest border crossing; and Thailand's grappling with a new outbreak now but it seems to be improving.)
And sure, border closures too. They're late in that the new variant is probably present at some level in most of Europe. But the fewer cases you have to start with, the longer it'll stay contained at low levels. You might even be able to contain it entirely for a while. All the cases of B.1.1.7 in Denmark (0.4% of their sequencing) appear to be part of the same cluster. They should be able to manage that much better than if the variant was being constantly reintroduced by travelers.
For the UK specifically, they're doing a bunch of things differently for their Tier 4 level vs. Tier 3, which was introduced specifically in response to B.1.1.7. Are you suggesting that all of those measures should have been done everywhere anyway?
Perhaps Brexit closing trade doors with the EU could be resulting in a stronger relationship between the US & UK?
The UK has an upcoming COVID vaccine (the Astra-Zeneca/Oxford one) that may prove useful in the near future. Cut off the UK from the rest of the world and the rest of the world can't benefit from it.
Also, it's almost certain that the UK strain is in the US already, and the US is shit at dealing with pandemics once they're on our soil. Border closures only work if your test/trace/isolate institutions and compliance with social distancing is good enough to eradicate the virus from within your borders; they prevent reinfection in that case. The US has shown we're completely incapable of that, so it really doesn't matter.
Even if the scale or details of circumstance are different—such as Clinton’s pardoning of his brother in minimizing Trump’s choices.
Another reason is exceptions cause outrage. And there may be many instances of diplomatic or other government travel that needs to happen or happen in the slipstream of limited public travel.
Though AFAIK it's kinda up in the air if Biden would go for the same thing.
How do you go back in time and get your population used to wearing masks (and having supply) at the beginning of the pandemic when it really matters?
That assumes that testing-dependent interventions (whether contact tracing and quarantines of the exposed, appropriate treatment of systematic infections, etc.) have nothing to do with the absence of excess deaths.
Which seems improbable.
At the same time, there are a lot of factors that are purely circumstantial, such as weather/climate, age/health of the population, elderly care system. These may have a lot of influence at the tail ends (deaths).
We must not fall into the trap of making post-hoc rationalizations that confirm what we want to believe. We're paying a heavy price with severe measures, if some data turned up that showed that it didn't make much of a difference, that would be a tough pill to swallow.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/03/trumps-coronavirus-t...
Cases are at all-time highs, and have pretty much escalated out of control:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2020...
I love the way you keep shifting the goalposts. When you’re shown that they haven’t controlled the virus, you pretend that it matters what the absolute magnitude of the case count is today. To wit: “You just don’t understand exponential growth!”
By the way, Korea has tested about 2M people, total, or about the same number of tests that the US did yesterday. So yeah...they’re probably finding a few less cases:
An island that has high-speed railway connections to Europe is not exactly isolated from the world, not to mention it's ferry connections with multiple neighboring countries in mainland Europe.
Additionally, Great Britain has about 3 times the population of Taiwan, and it's urban centers have between 5 and 7x the population of Taiwan's largest urban centers.
Of course a total closure would be a last resort, because that would cut off imports of things like fresh fruit, but it's been possible to get 20-minute pinprick blood tests since April (admittedly with lower accuracy than PCR tests) - the government simply decided measures like testing everyone at the border and enforcing mandatory self-isolation were not priorities.
As demonstrated by the recent French closure:
> French President Emmanuel Macron went further Sunday, with France barring UK travelers and shutting down the Eurotunnel crossing for at least 48 hours, meaning thousands of trucks carrying goods to the continent will not be able to cross the English Channel.
https://www.businessinsider.com/uk-border-chaos-after-france...
You now require a negative test (PCR or antigen) within the last 7 3 hours, and must be within a permitted category of traveller - https://uk.ambafrance.org/France-to-admit-some-travellers-fr...
https://news.sky.com/story/emergency-talks-to-prevent-christ...
...
> They wear masks without flaking out about it as slavery or being against their will or whatever nonsense you guys are on about back home in the west.
The 2nd part is what the GP was talking about with regards to 'obedience'. In some western countries like the US and UK, even the simple request for individuals to wear a mask is seen by some as an infringement on their human rights. There are literally documents floating around social media in the UK citing the Magna Carta[1] as a legal document for why they are entitled not to have their temperature checked!
Granted these people are idiots. But unfortunately the UK and US has also fostered a culture where everyone's voice is deemed equal, even the idiots. A classic example of this was during the EU referendum with the oft quoted phrase "why should we trust those so call experts?" as a retort against financial analysts voicing their concerns.
The problem is when you have research demoted to the same level as hearsay, a general distrust of the government and mix in a large does of fear due to economical, political and/or social unrest, you end up in an environment where those aforementioned idiots end up recruiting more idiots into their cause.
I'm not suggesting that Taiwanese people blindly do as their told but rather that some of the US and UK population intentionally do the opposite to what they're told simply as an act of defiance....sorry "freedom".
I've thought about this a lot as the pandemic and reaction unfolded. My feeling is that it's a little more nuanced.
From my perspective, it goes like this: (a) politics co-opts science, and (some) scientists become political (for career reasons), (b) political news media puts narrative-supporting "experts" on a pedestal (to reinforce their credibility), (c) people are told they lack the intelligence / knowledge / ability to ever be an expert, (d) people feel internal, unrealized shame at their ignorance, (e) people attempt to cover that shame by posing as experts for their peers, in fact just parroting whatever sound-bites they heard without critical thought, (f) rational debate drastically decreases, as critical thinking skills and underlying understanding have atrophied.
The net result: removal of critical thinking in the public, increased partisanship and anger, and a decreased ability of the public to dismiss crackpots posing as experts.
Recommended response: learn about the actual underlying issues, then (gently, remember (d)!) turn conversations to apolitical explorations of the underlying issues and truths.
Social media compounds things here because it allows people do get swallowed into this world of like minded people (aka the "echo chamber").
There's a fair amount on Wikipedia about the psychology at play which causes this. There's names for it all, all of which I can't recall because I've hit the Christmas spirits. Hopefully someone sober can be more helpful than I.
Most moral systems of my acquantance are based on a hierachy of values that puts saving human lives over just about anything.
False. While not explicitly stated there is a threshold usually measurable in money spent after which saving life is considered of being "not worth it". Ford Pinto case that went through the courts I think can serve as a very good particular example where cost analysis made it legal to allow otherwise preventable deaths.
The vast majority of deaths are people over age 55: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm#Ag...
Possibly better known as "first they came for", apparently officially titled "First they came..."
I would take the stories of Viet Nam’s “success” with a very large grain of salt. It should be impossible for me to know so many people with odd “severe pneumonia” there given that the entire country has nominally only had a thousand cases or so.
And they are controlling it now by effectively locking down the country to the rest of the world. Even if you're a Vietnamese citizen you can't get back into the country without permission. And the gov't is denying permission in all but the most extreme circumstances.
Malaysia shut its border with Singapore in mid-March [1], and Singapore had what I'd consider a lockdown (most businesses closed, no social gatherings allowed) between 7 April to 19 June [2].
[1] https://www.todayonline.com/8days/eatanddrink/newsandopening...
[2] https://www.gov.sg/article/ending-circuit-breaker-phased-app...
For example the vaccine against Japanese Encephalitis is under investigation for a possible cross-effect on covid immunity.
It's been experimentally verified that various pre-pandemic coronavirus antibodies are reactive against SARS-CoV-2.
It's a fact that different world populations have to deal with different endemic disease profiles.
Consequently, different populations have different pre-infection susceptibility to SARS-CoV-2. [0]
[0] https://www.ijidonline.com/article/S1201-9712(20)32310-9/ful...
Not to mention that after the first couple of months, Covid cases are now nicely distributed amongst younger populations as well. Fatalities are still concentrated in older people, but cases are still widespread across demographics.
The facts are staring everyone in the face: when countries started weakening their lockdown procedures, cases started going back up. And nobody's been willing to go back in full lockdown, for various reasons. And so cases are going up a bunch.
Meanwhile Vietnam had some cases in fall/winter, and _immediately_ locked stuff down, shut down universities, and quarantined people who had even a bit of contact with people in positive cases. The stuff was taken seriously, and numbers stayed low because of it.
Maybe the US and Europe "can't do it" because of a lack of political will etc. But it's not physically impossible.
But this obviously doesn’t change the bottom line: Their response was sufficient, while ours was not. This isn’t their Chernobyl like a lot of overconfident analysts proclaimed. I’d say it comes close to being our Chernobyl. Asian societies by and large did really well, and the pathetic response of the “First World” revealed a disturbing level of calcification and incompetence.
I guess perfect covid policy is contagious!
And of course, the same can be said for Mexico (because the main driver of the spread in the US is people not taking simple steps to prevent it).
Travel to Canada has been restricted for much of the year (I live in Michigan; there's a warning 4 hours from the border that travel is restricted). But that's because Canada isn't letting their fool neighbors in.
Ironically it's the other way around, too. Our borders are shut to tourists, but they keep showing up in Canmore and Banff anyway. And now Alberta has a serious problem with Covid spread, and a friend of my sister's just died a couple days ago from it. They have 1/3 the population of Ontario, yet close to the same numbers of daily cases and hospitalizations, which suggests triple the velocity.
There are compounding reasons as well, but everyone I know that lives there is complaining about all the Americans constantly showing up.
Vietnam has essentially one train line across the county that only splits up in the very north into two train lines into China. Vietnam has 2,600km of train lines, Germany for comparison has more than 41,000km, for a comparable area size. Vietnam has about 12M train passenger rides a year (pre-Corona of course), Germany has more than 2000M (does not include intra-city light rail rides). Thailand, with an area about 1.5x of either Vietnam or Germany, has 4,400km of train lines and 38M passenger rides.
Vietnam has about 250,000km of roads (50% paved), Germany has 600,000km (mostly paved). Vietnam has about 3M motorized vehicles (31 per 1000 population, but there is probably a significant number of unaccounted motor scooters), Germany has 56M motorized vehicles (701 per 1000), Thailand has 40M motorized vehicles (half being motor scooters/bikes, probably a significant number of unaccounted motor scooters) (571 per 1000).
You said "just like the US or EU", but I disagree given these numbers. The mobility, especially medium and long distance mobility, seem quite different.
Public life - as dictated by climate conditions and of course economic constraints - differs as well. Average temperature in Vietnam is 24°C, Thailand 26°C and Germany 9°C (and Spain/Greece/Italy aka the South of Europe it's 13°C). A lot more public life, incl paid and unpaid work, happens outside in Vietnam and Thailand, compared to Europe. When it was summer in Europe, we had a lot fewer cases and deaths than when it was cold and is now cold again. Colder weather and indoor living/working seems to heavily correlate with Corona, at least in Europe.
This doesn't mean we cannot learn from nations such as Vietnam and Thailand, but it's also not as straight forward as trying to outright mimic what they did and do in response to the pandemic.
In this case, I was putting the blame both ways. The thread started by blaming Canadians. Jason Kenney (not Kennedy, that's some other bloke) made the border so weak there that Alberta is inundated with US-bred Covid hotspots. Of course it's going in the other direction, too. There are hotspots trading germs by deciding they should visit each other, mingle, go home, repeat.
Canada isn't taking so many cases to the US. Unless you look at Alberta. Kenney there has screwed that up in both directions by somehow not noticing the tourists going through either way. He's turned it into a slow cooker of viral stew.
If I sound pissy about it, it's because both sides of the border should be shutting that down and not allowing it, even through the loopholes they are both entertaining at this particular stretch. My sister's best friend died of Covid that she caught in Banff 4 days ago. She lived and worked there, and complained about the number of Americans showing up. What a surprise.
It's both ways. There are conservatives that enjoy Trump's ideals - pretty much defining Alberta. They're gonna kill us all eventually.
Ontario is stricter about it, and everyone (again on both sides of the border) bitch about it. The problem in Ontario is the sticker-monger wants to let you celebrate and then lock down so you die out of sight of the public.
We'll never get ahead of this when everyone thinks they are somehow not the ones transporting this virus around, yet won't stop travelling and "breathing moistly."