Coronavirus Pandemic (COVID-19) (SARS-CoV-2) [2020]

I just wish the folks advocating the laissez faire approach to the lives of victims v. the health of the economy would be honest. Spell it out. Just say it. It's easy - my livelihood is worth more to me than your life. I'm not sure why they need to dress it up.
 
Liveblog zum Coronavirus: ++ Britische Virus-Variante auch in Italien ++ | tagesschau.de

Passengers from London stopped in Hanover
11:04 p.m.

Concerned about the new variant of the Coronavirus emerging in the UK, the Hanover region has halted entry for 63 passengers on a flight from London. Passengers would have to stay at the airport site until the Corona test result is available, a regional spokeswoman said. It expects the results to be available on Monday, but that is not certain.

According to Hannover Airport, field beds have been set up in Terminal D, where passengers are also being cared for. A spokesman for the Federal Police said one woman wanted to fly back to London and that everyone else had to undergo the so-called PCR test. "Our goal is to prevent the new type of virus from moving into Lower Saxony unnoticed," said Andreas Kranz, head of the public health department of the Hanover region.

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First case of mutated virus in Italy
20:30 Uhr

In Italy, the new variant of the virus from the UK has been detected for the first time in a corona patient. This was announced by the Ministry of Health. The man and his partner had flown back to Rome from the UK in recent days and were now in isolation.
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(Translated with Microsoft Edge)

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https://twitter.com/x/status/1340694809997160452
 
I'm not yet convinced that the new variant is much more than a good excuse for our government to make a 180 degree turnaround and implement the necessary controls due to the surge in infections. It gives them an excellent excuse to make another U-turn from the poorly thought out rules allowing too much mixing of households over the Christmas period without acknowledging the policy was flawed in the first place.

It seems that the variant was first recorded back in September and is now widespread around the country. If this is the case, why did it take so long for this surge to take place? England was locked down during much of November but infections would surely have ramped up during the October if this variant was much more transmissible?Anecdotally, I've heard from people in the south east that people have been very lax in general about following distancing rules since the lockdown ended. Could be a cause of the surge?

We'll have to wait and see what other data becomes available as more research is carried out. Fingers-crossed it is just a false alarm, of course!
 
https://www.dw.com/en/anti-vaxxers-should-forgo-ventilators-german-doctor-says/a-55996805

"Whoever wants to refuse the vaccination outright, he should, please also always carry a document with the inscription: 'I don't want to be vaccinated!'" Wolfram Henn, a human geneticist, told Bild on Saturday. "I want to leave the protection against the disease to others! I want, if I get sick, to leave my intensive care bed and ventilator to others."
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:mrgreen:
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https://observers.france24.com/en/europe/20201221-debunked-fainting-covid-vaccine
:mad:
 
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Pence got vaccinated on tv, Trump could have done something really valuable by also getting vaccinated and urging everyone else to do so because it's pretty much a certainty that the anti vax brigade are all trump followers but oh no he's too busy acting like a spoilt child.
 
https://twitter.com/x/status/1340409968818671616

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Full Unrolled Thread @ https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1340409968818671616.html

With #COVID19 vaccine efficacy of ~95%, I'm looking forward to vaccine distribution in 2021 bringing the pandemic under control. However, I'm concerned that we'll see antigenic drift of SARS-CoV-2 and may need to update the strain used in the vaccine with some regularity.

First, some background. RNA viruses all evolve extremely rapidly, but some like influenza are able to accept mutations to their surface proteins in such a way that they can partially escape human immunity. This process is known as "antigenic drift".

For influenza, this necessitates regular vaccine updates to keep up with an evolving virus population. Other RNA viruses like measles mutate quickly but are unable to change protein structure to escape from immunity and so these vaccines don't need updating.

There has been an open question to the degree to which SARS-CoV-2 will behave like influenza and require vaccine updates. However, emerging evidence suggests that antigenic drift is likely.

First off, we have new studies on antigenic drift in seasonal coronaviruses. Katie Kistler and I have shown abundant adaptive evolution in the spike proteins of viruses OC43 and 229E consistent with antigenic drift ( https://bedford.io/papers/kistler-hcov-adaptive-evolution/ ).

We also now have direct serological evidence of antigenic drift in 229E from @eguia_rachel, @jbloom_lab et al, suggesting that reinfection by seasonal coronaviruses that occurs every ~3 years is in part due to evolution of the virus.

For SARS-CoV-2, we only expect antigenic variants to spread once enough people have been infected to give these variants a transmission advantage gained by the ability to reinfect some portion of individuals immune to the original variant.

At this point, many countries have had perhaps 10% to 20% of their population infected ( https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.12.01.20241539v1 ), and so we expect some weak evolutionary pressure for antigenic drift.

We've now seen the emergence and spread of several variants that may have some antigenic impact. These variants are generally labeled based on the mutation to the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein. For example N439K has a change from asparagine (N) to lysine (K) at site 439 in spike.

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There's an airline pilot, who is a foreigner, was infected and, during the quarantine period (airline pilots only need to spend 3 days in quarantine in Taiwan), he went out (which is against the rule) to some crowded department stores, and now there's at least one confirmed local transmission case, who was in close contact with the pilot. The last confirmed local transmission case in Taiwan was in April.
 
digitalwanderer said:
So TL/DR: "Not good news"
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It's probably a case that the response generated by the current vaccines will continue to have some effect as the virus mutates. Will it be enough to ensure that there is some protection (if not quite to the same degree) for some years to come? Quite probable. If it is enough to just stop the most severe of reactions, it's not too much of an issue, though as with the flu and the current virus, the elderly and those with compromised immune systems will be most at risk.

It will be helpful if/when the scientists can work out how to treat the autoimmune response which leads to the most severe symptoms. If it is possible to get some effective treatments for this, then it also becomes less of an issue though, from what I've read, it is likely to be a few years before any bespoke treatments are available. Everything tried at present is just repurposing current drugs on the off-chance that they might be helpful (as with dexamethasone).
 
pcchen said:
There's an airline pilot, who is a foreigner, was infected and, during the quarantine period (airline pilots only need to spend 3 days in quarantine in Taiwan), he went out (which is against the rule) to some crowded department stores, and now there's at least one confirmed local transmission case, who was in close contact with the pilot. The last confirmed local transmission case in Taiwan was in April.
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He was a kiwi or so I read, :D Looking at the numbers Taiwan has prolly done the best out of any countries at controlling the virus (let me guess governed by a lady)
Seems strange pilots 3 days vs general public 2 weeks, I know spending many hours aloof can physically change you, but I thought this was detrimentally (rhetorical statement)
 
pcchen said:
There's an airline pilot, who is a foreigner, was infected and, during the quarantine period (airline pilots only need to spend 3 days in quarantine in Taiwan), he went out (which is against the rule) to some crowded department stores, and now there's at least one confirmed local transmission case, who was in close contact with the pilot. The last confirmed local transmission case in Taiwan was in April.
Click to expand...

We've just had a new cluster of ~30 cases spring up this / later last week that has confirmed via genomic sequencing to have come from America. Clearly someone did not isolate. I don't believe we were forcing aircrew to isolate at the time either so it likely came from them.
 
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