I’ve often said that here in 
we manage, in our own superficially mellow way, to get by on the most mediocre aspects of 
capitalism and least interesting parts of soviet communism. This does lead us to having a bit of a mood at times, which another wealthy Canadian has gravely mis-read…
In other notes, recall that two weeks ago we got a forecast that was done, in part, at my alma mater, the University of Waterloo.
Perhaps not quite yet a “lock” statistically speaking, but the Boris Johnson variant B.1.1.7 is now 20% of our local case rate and rising.
“What we see in the data is a progressive increase in (the) B.1.1.7 (variant), exactly as predicted three weeks ago,” says Dr. David Fisman, epidemiologist at the University of Toronto, and a member of the province’s independent volunteer science table. “The R for new variants is 1.29, and old variants is 0.87. So as new variants become more common, that’s going to push overall R back up.”
Seeing the same thing here. On the Worldometer 7 day graph after cases reports falling pretty impressively they have flattened and begun to trend up again. Hard to tell if it is due to new variants or just thinking it’s over and relaxing our (inadequate) precautions. I tend to think it’s the later. Once the former becomes an issue, we will be headed right back up again.
Rio, NY, San Francisco… Soon, every major city Will have It’s own Covid Variant.
No one is wearing masks here anymore.
Hint: it’s not the masks, it’s the year-long global pandemic. 
That sucks. I’m sorry 
@docosc Hard to tell if it is due to new variants or just thinking it’s over and relaxing our (inadequate) precautions.
That got me thinking about mutations. I was slightly reassured to read that SARS-CoV-1, the very nasty 2003 edition, and SARS-CoV-2, 2019 edition were genetically quite separated. I was less reassured to read
In order for CoVs to recombine, they must first have the opportunity to do so by sharing overlapping geographic ranges, host species tropism, and cell and tissue tropism.
and
In order for recombination to have occurred between [SARS, 2003] and [SARS-CoV-2,2019], these viruses must have had the opportunity to coinfect the same host cell. We demonstrate that recombination is possible given that viruses related to SARS-CoV-1 and −2 appear to share both geographic and host space in southwestern China…
That’s what keeps me up at night. The short-run effects are what they are; the mutations in the UK, ZA and California already bad enough. A mutation that’s really nasty is just a matter of time and random processes that we are nurturing with bad behaviour.
Thank Gawd. Can you imagine the mess if Scotty had not wisely chosen to get the hell out of the way early on?
In other notes…
Kudos to @Katryn and @docosc who, as far as I can tell, were the first on the BBS to call it when it came to asymptomatic transmission of COVID-19 on Jan 21, 2020. That puts you, doc, about 5 months ahead of Ontario 
's Chief Medical Officer, who didn’t see it until the summer. I’m inclined to excuse Dr Williams from outright pillory given his age, but I’ve been calling for his summary retirement for about 6 months, personally… (edit to extend credit where credit is due 
)
Wow, that is a blast from the past. This was about the same time I was quite literally pounding the table begging people to take this seriously, but no go. Ah, well, past is past, we just gotta deal, now. Last January was a long decade ago.
Of course @docosc was on top of this, but it would be wrong not to point out that he was responding to @Katryn’s post on the subject. There were quite a few savvy posters back then warning the BBS that this was going to be a BIG problem.
The political authority of Xi Jinping and the CCP made it somewhat easier to impose a citywide shutdown in China than in the U.S.
And in other fascist dictatorships, like South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, New Zealand, Australia…
God that line pisses me off every time I hear it, even when they try to add some context, like here.
it is definitely more accurate when flipped:
the political authority of donald trump and the gop made it somewhat much more difficult to impose a citywide shutdown in the us than china.
The flip side of that statement is “The political authority of Xi Jingping and the CCP made it much easier to surprises the initial warnings of a new SARS-like illness, and facilitated its spread”.
I still don’t buy that. People who were paying attention knew is was scary and likely to spread globally by the end of January. People (like 45) who received intelligence briefings knew weeks sooner. Sure, the CCP tried to suppress news of the epidemic, but not for very long, and not for a critical period of time. By the time authorities knew about it, there was plenty of time to act. Some did, some didn’t, and here we are.
