Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/12/29/first-known-us-case-of-covid-19-variant-from-uk-reported-in-colorado.html
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Yeah, in a few years people will ask “Daddy, why didn’t they shut down the airlines?”
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Wait, People can still travel internationally right now? Are you fucking kidding me?
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I’m sure this will be handled with the usual competence and sense of urgency we’ve seen so far in America’s response to COVID.
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Right? With no travel history for this “first” US patient, it means this varient has been around the planet for some time.
If the new virus’ spike doesn’t match the spike the approved vaccines are designed for, get ready to spend 2021 and maybe 2022 at home. We’re renovating the guest bedroom back into an office as of last weekend, not because of this new varient, but because the prevalent variant vaccine won’t get to us WFH office drones until next winter at the rate things are going.
[Dear Dog, do I hate this timeline.]
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Some countries are closed to the outside, but that doesn’t stop some wealthy and/or resourceful folks who think they’re above quarantine mandates.
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The “known” is carrying a lot of weight in the headline.
Without any surveillance testing program and not sequencing enough tests nationally, it’s likely been here for a long time, maybe even first. We just didn’t have any way to know.
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History will remember this as the generation which let the viruses win.
Spoiler: these future historians will be viruses.
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And the rich still travel by boat. Even if airlines were grounded it would gotten here eventually.
I saw a British flagged sailboat in a marina near here over the weekend.
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This is now known. There were about 14 mutations/deletions, but not so much that the virus has overtaken the vaccines. They still work.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/more/scientific-brief-emerging-variant.html
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It probably came with the Mike Pence expeditionary ski infection force
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“We cured the patient’s disease.”
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If it’s a boat small enough that everyone was exposed to everyone else, and they were at sea at least a month, then the chances of a hidden asymptomatic fuse sputtering away seem remote.
Those floating noble castles with helipads and sub-boat docks? Too much chance of people coming and going. Fuck them!
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It was identified in the UK some time around, what, September?, so it’s been spreading globally since then, at least. The US hasn’t been bothering to do the kind of genetic analysis that would have revealed the presence of these kinds of variants, so we don’t know how widespread they are.
Oh no, this administration screwed the pooch so badly in totally failing to do any logistics for the roll-out, that at current pace, it’ll take 10 years to vaccinate enough of the population to have herd immunity.
I’m getting super-pessimistic about the outcome for all this. Those who are suggesting that covid might be a permanent fixture in our world seem like they’re on to something.
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This. It would actually be really interesting to see if this variant had become common/dominant in parts of the US, and if so might provide more evidence to support the claim that it is more contagious. But we haven’t really bothered looking.
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Kidding you? You’re funny. When the variant was announced, they did some testing here in Switzerland and discovered a handful of cases here already. So they announced a “retrospective quarantine” on all the British and South Africans who had entered the country since 14th December.
Get this: there were over 10,000 British visitors to track down, most of them here for the ski season, because Switzerland decided to buck the Euro trend, and its ski fields are the only ones available. The snow economy was deemed more important than the mounting death toll. Most of the British just instantly absconded overnight from their hotels, because they refuse to be bound by a sudden “unexpected” quarantine while on holiday - with no enforcement, the retrospective quarantine has merely exacerbated things by spreading the potentially offending Brits far and wide.
There are plenty of flights everywhere - one of our (angry and tired) epidemiologists noted that there were 16 direct flights from London to Geneva alone on 19th December.
Nobody, but nobody, gets tested at our three major airports on arrival.
Sorry to break the obvious news, but corona and covid-19 aren’t going to disappear any time soon, just don’t believe it.
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There is not enough even in the universe for me to can’t now.
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The only guy in the Trump White House not to get COVID-19. I think your on to something @eap.
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Then there ought to be plenty of scope for the Biden administration to do better.
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*Austria pipes up: “Hey, don’t forget us! Our slopes are open, too! We don’t want to miss out on that sweet, sweet virus-tinged tourist cashflow!”
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