Highly contagious COVID variant first found in UK is now in California and Colorado, could change course of pandemic in US

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Or the Fuck You, My Personal Convenience Is More Important Than Your Actual Life Virus or FYMPCIMITYAL-20, a bit of a mouthful, even the acronym so, more succinctly ‘Empathy Deficit Virus’ or EPV-20.

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[obligatory “why not both” meme here]

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And still he’s hedging with “UK” rather than “England”, too.

Always the same. If something good happens in another country of the UK or something bad happens in England English nationalists will hide behind the union, if something good happens in England it’s just that country that gets mentioned.

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Now with added sovereignty - and blue passports for the fish we catch but don’t eat.

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Roger Helmer? Dear god, there’s an unwelcome blast from the past (a sort of cabbagey trump). Still sporting his MEP handle and no doubt still enjoying his MEP pension from an organisation he despises.

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Basically everywhere has been, because the UK is the world capital of sequencing. It’s a British invention (Fred Sanger got his second Nobel prize for it), and the main advances that have made it much quicker and cheaper in recent years (Illumina/Solexa sequencing and nanopore sequencing) also came out of research at British universities.

There were also decisions taken in recent years to dramatically increase the use of sequencing in the NHS, which meant the capacity was there to sequence more samples than any other sizeable country- Denmark has sequenced a larger proportion of their positive tests, but due to their much smaller population a larger proportion of the sequences in the database are from the UK. The eye-catching number is that Wales sequenced more samples in a week than France did in 9 months…

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There is a simpler way of looking at this…

If a COVID variant was less infectious, it would be outpaced by regular Brand X COVID in a few generations, and we would not know about it. If it is more infectious, we do know about it. COVID mutates: it wasn’t in humans and then it was. It is now in a lot of humans, so there are high odds of it mutating again. This is not surprising. And it may happen again.

Blaming it on foreigners seems to be UK Government policy. The idea that this sort of thing could come from Englishmen was unthinkable to them. But it is going to happen somewhere, and is more likely to happen where COVID is not being controlled.

Did the US COVID strain come from the UK? Did the original COVID come from Wuhan? We can’t really tell, as we only notice the changes when they show up on the aggregate health statistics. Even if we knew, it has probably spread already, so knowing doesn’t help.

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A mirror of the paywalled NYT article.

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can-you-ever-forgive-jesus-no

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Yup.

I went to the grocery store here in TJ to grab some food to cover tonight and tomorrow, and the place was packed to the ceiling with shoppers buying snacks and alcohol. I’m positive we’re going to have a replay of Xmas Eve down here.

tenor(10)

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That doesn’t necessarily hold, even up to quite large scales, given the non-linear way that all Covid strains spread. If you start with ten people infected with different but equally-infectious strains, it would be entirely plausible to find that two months later, one strain has infected thousands of people and the others haven’t spread at all. As you scale the numbers up, you’d still expect to see some strains doing orders of magnitude better than others due to random chance alone; and the effects of immunity may further amplify that anisotropy.

To put it another way, any Covid variant can spread explosively if it hits the right circumstances. So it takes some very careful analysis, and a lot of data, to distinguish “more transmissible” from “was transmitted more”. As this article mentions, that was the issue with the previous B.1.177 strain, and in that case it was scientists (rather than politicians and journalists) who were misled by the early data.

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Yeah my understanding is the UK government were told by Sage that the NV may be more contagious and jumped on that as an excuse for the catastrophic rise in infections rather than cop the blame for their decisions. Our politicians saw how that kind of worked and looked plausible to those who might vote for them and ran with it. Rinse and repeat all around the world.

So UK: Brexit is working! Britain’s influence around the world in terms of soft power is at a lifetime high! All the politicians in power are copying your government’s little Porkie pies.

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True: there is a lot of random in there as well. I tried to keep things simple in my post, and I decided a strain that spread because it was effective, and a strain that spread because it was lucky were almost the same thing. We are still not quite sure which one we have here, anyhow. But I would have corrected anyone else who said that, so that’s fair.

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NYE will be in full swing here in No. Alabama. Bars, restaurants, concerts, a city-owned skate park are all advertising their events tonight.

The local government talking heads make gentle noises about the hospitals being near/at/over capacity. The statewide mask mandate is unenforced, relying solely on the good sense and good will of the good citizens of Alabama to do the right thing, and let’s just say that doing the right thing is not what Alabamians as a group are known for.

Last week one of the hospital administrators said that estimates are that between 20 and 25% of people in this county are infected. And the populace is largely shrugging and ready to party on.

I’ve lost hope.

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If I break a leg it will be tough to walk to the store to buy more cigs. I’ll keep this in mind if things get real bad on the 3rd day and I’m about to break down and go buy a pack. Probably not how I would have gone about it, but your plan would be effective. Keeping it as a “Plan B” option.

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The media in Australia hinted at this, saying that

  • mutations are a normal thing, and
  • mutations that are in different countries are often operating under different policies - it can be very hard to distinguish changes in virus’ inherent contagion rates vs changes in policy.

The effect of different contagion rate and different policy can be much the same - more or fewer people infected.

In cases where there is a huge difference in contagion rates, it’s obvious. But this isn’t commonly the case.

The media didn’t outright call shenanigans, but they did caution people that “more contagious” is either bleedin’ obvious (which isn’t the case here) or hard to prove without some painstaking lab work.

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It’s no big deal.

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