New coronavirus variant: What do we know?
bbc.comEwan Birney (deputy directory of EMBL European Molecular Biology Laboratory)'s Twitter is a really good source of first class scientific information on this.
You need to scroll back about 2 days to get the latest info (and he refers to the Twitter accounts of others in the field who can give more information).
His Twitter profile is @ https://twitter.com/ewanbirney/
(Ewan is awesome - he is also (co)director of EMBL-EBI European Bioinformatics Institute, and I had the honour (as a Computer Scientist) of working there for nine years)
In the latest episode of This Week in Virology[1] five virologists discuss this issue.
Some points they made:
"It's a variant. It's not a strain. A strain is a virus with a new biological property. There have been no new properties ascribed to this isolate other than sequence differences, which is not enough to make a strain.. nor have we seen any other new strains of SARS-CoV-2 that anybody's demonstrated to be biologically different. None. It hasn't happened yet. I'm not saying it couldn't but it hasn't."
"Nobody's done any experiments to determine the effects of these changes on any property of the virus. Yet when a journalist calls up a scientist and say "What do you think?" and the scientist says "These could have an effect on virulence or transmission or antibody neutralization," somehow that gets translated in to "It's making the virus more virulent" and that's what's circulated and a dozen people this week said to me "What do you think about these mutations in the UK that make the virus more virulent, more transmissible, more resistant to neutralization by antibodies?" None of that has been shown, folks! It's speculation. There's no paper on any of this."
[1] - Starting at about 54 minutes in to episode 696: https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-696/
>Yet when a journalist calls up a scientist and say "What do you think?" and the scientist says "These could have an effect on virulence or transmission or antibody neutralization," somehow that gets translated in to "It's making the virus more virulent"
This has been an incredibly large issue for almost a year now and it's ridiculous. Journalists not understanding the way scientists speak was vaguely understandable ten months ago, but after a year straight of science being the number one news maker in the world it's obvious that the media is just use it as an excuse to scare-monger and increase their clicks.
Literally every day in the last few weeks I've had to explain to someone that vaccines will almost certainly have a profound impact on if people can transmit the virus because the news articles keep taking the "We don't have data yet on how it impacts transmission" and reporting that as the worst case scenario, when in all likelihood it will profoundly diminish people's ability to transmit the virus.
Well we’re about 10 months into this and most news outlets won’t even admit that there’s natural immunity, even though with 10s of millions of cases we have maybe a dozen of cases worldwide of reinfection.
I think the fundamental issue is that the public health measures break down once everyone doesn’t have to follow them. So either you refuse to admit that there’s no reason for a recovered COVID patient to wear a mask, or quarantine after close contact with a new case, etc.
Or else, if you admit that exemption, you either basically can’t enforce the rules anymore, or you need to track everyone who was infected and provide verifiable “passports” which is a step toward a dystopian future we should not allow.
I think in the end it’s easier to deny that there is true natural or vaccinated immunity than to deal with this conundrum head-on. However, at some point the admission must come, I can only hope in the April/May timeframe once vaccination is more widespread.
This does not appear to be true at all.
Newspapers are very willing to admit natural immunity. But scientists point out they don't know how effective it is, and/or how long lasting it is.
It's very clear newspapers have been way to casual with admitting natural immunity.
If you want some fairly clear evidence of this, if you were gonna ask a 1000 people whether they were immune if they got the virus and recovered from it, I suspect 999 of them would say yes. And you wouldnt get those numbers if newspapers were stating the opposite.
What the rest of your comment ignores is that we actually don't know whether people who are immune, can nevertheless transmit the disease. Furthermore, false positives do exist.
In fact, even people who are vaccinated will be advised to wear masks, because we do not know whether the vaccine prevents spread, or if it only protects the vaccinated. The Pfizer and Moderna trials did not factor this in their testing at all. I am not sure about the AstraZeneca one, but their trials have had a lot of issues anyways. And no other vaccine's trials have been completed yet.
E.g: A NYTimes article comparing natural immunity vs a vaccine from 2 weeks ago. Note the concept of natural immunity is considered a given, and is not even questioned (and it includes the statement, for example, "Natural immunity from the coronavirus is fortunately quite strong"):
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/05/health/covid-natural-immu...
> If you want some fairly clear evidence of this, if you were gonna ask a 1000 people whether they were immune if they got the virus and recovered from it, I suspect 999 of them would say yes.
I don't think this is close to true. For example when Rand Paul claimed he had immunity after recovering from Covid, liberals I'm in casual contact with were jumping up and down screaming "he's not immune! he's not immune!" Of the maybe 10 people I know of who've had Covid and recovered, 2 are still actively worried and living in terror that they will get it again.
My anecdotal evidence is that most people I talk to believe that reinfection is possible or even likely, as "shown by the news"
>This has been an incredibly large issue for almost a year now and it's ridiculous. Journalists not understanding the way scientists speak was vaguely understandable ten months ago, but after a year straight of science being the number one news maker in the world it's obvious that the media is just use it as an excuse to scare-monger and increase their clicks.
Not understanding or not wanting to understand? It's become fully mainstream to interpret the most scary or salacious or intriguing angle. I used to love the BBC and NYT but they are right up there with some of the worst, when it comes to the narratives and forced angles.
“It is hard for a person to understand something when their income depends on not understanding it”(upton Sinclair) explains too much of the modern world, unfortunately.
> Journalists not understanding
Journalists don't understand anything about the topics on which they write, but they regard themselves as paragons of virtue and arbiters of Truth with a capital T.
Trump is a garbage president but the one thing he got right was identifying the fourth estate as the enemy of the people. They were Enemies in March when they told everyone it was just the Flu, and NOT to wear masks, and they are are Enemies now when they whip the public into hysterics.
Nor is this anything new with Fox News, or CNN, or even with William Randolph Hearst, as some may claim. They have been the Enemy since time immemorial and they always will be.
Rosebud, indeed.
> Journalists don't understand anything about the topics on which they write, but they regard themselves as paragons of virtue and arbiters of Truth with a capital T.
This assertion makes no sense at all. Journalists aren't expected to create their content from thin air. They are expected to talk with primary sources, ask them questions, gather the answers and information, and report on that to the public.
> Trump is a garbage president but the one thing he got right was identifying the fourth estate as the enemy of the people.
Oh give me a break. The only thing Trump did was come up with a populist angle to sell it to gullible idiots in the form of conspiracy theories. It makes absolutely no difference whether anything resembling Trump's conspiracy theories have a bearing in reality or not because as his term demonstrated he did rigorously zero to address, let alone fix, any of his pet conspiracy theories. He used them as a mariachi's guitar, just popping it out of the case whenever he felt he needed to prop up support from his base and back in the box it went when he felt things went his way.
I mean, just look at the way he boasted about voting by mail and afterwards he proceeded to fabricate all sorts of bullshit to discredit mail-id votes.
I swear to gid during the Bush era all the 'liberal' newspapers and people on reddit claimed the voting machines are rigged. Now it's the opposite. It's a never ending bullshit from you.
I'm sorry to burst your childish "but he started it" bubble, but I am not a US citizen nor have I ever set foot in the US. So please direct your childish ad hominem attacks and general finger wagging elsewhere, and meanwhile do some introspection.
They go on to say that in this case it's probably the opposite, scientists calling up journalists. Which seems relevant given the OP in this thread linking to a scientist making a number of statements based on unproven hypotheses.
Seems as though it would go both ways.
Scientists have career-advancing reasons to have their opinions and research--whether confirmed by evidence and peer reviewed or not--distributed by the media. And the media has incentive to amplify concerning or controversial information.
What's tragic is that these hypotheses or conjectures are being used to make public policy decisions that affect millions or billions of people. And it seems that public servants and officials lack the scientific aptitude or inclination to truly understand how solid the data and conclusions are before acting on them. Or, perhaps more cynically, the officials know the conjecture is unverified but--being accountable to a public who will likely not read beyond the headlines and who will believe any article that starts with "Scientists find ..."--are forced to take action purely to hold the appearance of doing something.
Regardless of the directionality, I agree with the parent that 2020 is demonstrating serious flaws in the relationships between the scientific community, journalism, public policy makers, and the public.
Yes I agree completely. The recent TWiV has some great discussion on this between this new variant and that ridiculous "sars-cov-2 is reverse transcribing into the human genome" preprint. The scientific publication process and science journalism has always been somewhat broken it just rarely had serious consequences, now it's another broken system the pandemic is shining a light on.
I think the media has a real problem with reporting uncertainty. What's interesting is that there was a collective effort not to jump to conclusions and be careful when reporting on the presidential election. They showed they're capable of restraint when they think it's warranted, but with the pandemic they can't help but reach for the "Because of [unproven report] [consequence] is very likely" formula.
>Scientists have career-advancing reasons to have their opinions and research--whether confirmed by evidence and peer reviewed or not--distributed by the media.
Couldn't agree with this more. The number of ill-conceived pre-print "studies" I've seen get released this year is disappointing. Tons of studies with either a tiny sample size and questionable methods (medicines given very late in the progression of the disease, control groups whose demographics don't remotely match the test group, etc.). And of course those studies get reported on with no indication they were poorly done.
I hope we look back critically at mainstream media role in all aspects of covid analyse and reactions.
Commercial news media is so far from critical analysis that it's dangerous that we allow it anywhere near our decision making processes.
I realize that this is probably an unpopular opinion among techies but I really wish people would post information on a website and then link to it from Twitter. At the very least, double post it. I don't use Twitter and actively block it and Facebook's various websites from my router and VPN. Additionally, reading long threads on Twitter or back and forth replies for a non-regular Twitter user is taxing.
https://threadreaderapp.com/ is a popular choice that allows you to combine a tweet thread into a single page.
Direct link to the thread where he explains why the evidence, although not conclusive, strongly supports a higher infectivity of the new variant: https://mobile.twitter.com/jcbarret/status/13407169016101724...
This is a perfect example of mixing science and opinion, and we should be scolding "scientists" who do this without clarifying which is which, not lionizing them.
The only definitively factual statement he makes is in the first tweet:
"One of the key questions about the new variant (B.1.1.7) is whether there is conclusive evidence that it is more transmissible. I don't think we are absolutely certain yet"
Everything else is speculation. He says that founder effect is not likely because the virus is spreading widely, nationwide: this is a hypothesis, not a statement of fact. He says that there are reasons to believe that the mutations are associated with structural regions known to be important to transmission: this is a hypothesis, not a statement of fact.
He then says that because of these two unproven hypotheses (which he implicitly believes), one should "change your priors" on how likely it is that this strain is selectively advantaged. Certainly, one can "change their priors" based on personal opinion, but that doesn't mean that other informed scientists don't have different opinions.
What this guy is doing is citing the (limited, non-definitive) evidence that we know, and then saying he has an opinion about what it all means. That doesn't make it factual.
Without well-controlled cell-culture or animal studies that show that this strain is out-competing other strains in vivo, we don't have solid evidence either way. Trying to predict the organism-level impact of point mutations is a fun parlor game, but no more or less definitive than asking a sports fan which team is going to win on Sunday.
I don't wish to veer into ad hominem arguments, but it is worth noting that the UK government must be very relieved to be able to associate the new lockdown rules with the new strain of the virus.
By pointing to an unpredictable external factor they can justify the apparent U-turn in their policy, while also not having to point the finger at any potential voters who may not have been following the rules well enough.
Whether the government's political needs have an effect on how scientists interpret or represent their findings is something I only have a hypothesis about.
You could spend ten minutes debating whether the growing bright light and rising Doppler sound exactly matches the expected profile of an oncoming train.. or you could just get off the tracks. Here absolute fact is only clear when the effect is so strong it's too late.
> Here absolute fact is only clear when the effect is so strong it's too late.
This! I strongly agree that one should not mix up scientific hard knowledge with hypotheses, statements of likelihood, educated guesses and so on.
However, I do not agree at all with the demand that you always need to be 100% sure to act decisively on something important. That is just not how life works!
It does not work like that in the small. If you are a parent and you smell smoke, and your children are playing upstairs, there is no requirement that you know with certainty there is a fire before you get your kids out of the house. You get them out.
If you are a bus driver packed full with people chopping a long a foggy motorway in the morning, and three hundred meters ahead appears something which looks like an overthrown heavy truck, you do not need to be 100& certain to hit the brakes. You brake.
If you are captain of a frigate in heavy weather and with serious navigation difficulties, and ahead appears something which looks damn likely like a rock or a VLCC, you do not need absolute certainty to change course. You just change.
And in fact we demand the same from industrial and military leaders all the time. It is even one defining element of leadership to act both wisely and decidedly under uncertain conditions.
And now, we go and demand that the evidence we get from scientists has 100% certainty before we act. That's wrong. It is not intelligent behaviour because a lot of things will have irreversible consequences before we have certainty about the situation.
(And interestingly, we have seen exactly the same pattern on the topic of climate change.)
The problem is, there is always someone willing to make extreme arguments to convince people that this is the exceptional circumstance where evidence doesn't matter, and that we all need to do something urgent and panicky, now.
Usually, those people are wrong.
> Without well-controlled cell-culture or animal studies that show that this strain is out-competing other strains in vivo, we don't have solid evidence either way.
Just a question:
If two weeks from now, it becomes evident that more than 90 % of all infections in the UK are with the new variant, would you change your opinion?
On TWiV they call it a SWAG, scientific wild ass guess
Are there any non-twitter sources available? I can't access that website.
Also, I doubt twitter is the place where that information should live long-term anyway.
Try nitter, it's a fast alternative to reading Twitter content on Twitter itself. I modified the link above for you:
I did see him mention on twitter the other day that he was going to be on a BBC segment talking about this, so there could be video archives on that front
There is also this comment by Eric Feigl-Ding:
https://twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1340913688992165888
> "14) “In the lab, Gupta’s group found that virus carrying the two mutations was less susceptible to convalescent plasma from several donors than the wildtype (common strain) virus. That suggests it can evade antibodies targeting the wildtype virus”!!"
Could that mean that the "herd immunity strategy" by letting relatively healthy people being infected by the virus might fail utterly because the immunity they acquire does not help very much against the new variant?
Visiting Hacker News with a text-mode browser (Links2, in this case) is so liberating! Twitter says that my browser is not supported (unsurprisingly enough).
Well, I think I'll have to adapt to ditch a website that needs a shit-ton of JS to serve me a few KibiBytes of content.
Wouldn't there be an element of cherry picking to this whole variant story? Like, don't viruses mutate constantly, we just don't analyze them in a disciplined manner most of the time, so if you start doing that you're bound to find something like this, but so would anyone else conducting a similar analysis anywhere else and at any other point in the pandemic?
Yes variants occur all the time but they don't tend to become dominant. This variant went from 30% of all infections in November to 60% three weeks later. In order for a given variant to supplant all the others and become dominant it must have some characteristics that make it more transmissible. That is why they are particularly worried about this variant.
Could it still be that this variant is as infectious as others, but just happens to be the dominant one in the regions where the virus circulates the most, for reasons that have nothing to do with the genetics of the virus?
London and the South East are some of the densest populated areas in the UK, and one could expect exponential growth of infections there while other less populated areas could manage to keep their Rt around or bellow zero. If this strain was more prevalent in these regions, you would also see it taking a larger share of the infections nationwide.
However, the precautionary principle has been the keystone of good handling in the pandemic, so they are right to apply precautionary measures before it's too late. We will learn more about this strain in the next few weeks.
Look at the prevalence graph in the article, you can see that the new variant has been gradually taking over the turf from the other ones. This cannot be explained by just the founder effect unlike most other cases, since the prevalence was high to start with. It cannot be explained away by a single super-spreader event, since a single event will just cause a single step-change. This has been a continuous process.
It could be random chance or a selective advantage, but then it comes down to just a modeling exercise. How likely is it that this could happen by chance? And it appears quite unlikely: instead the best way to explain the data is a significantly increased transmission.
Is this also taking out potential confounders out of the equation? I believe the currently available data (as opposed to the SAGE minutes, which has the conclusions) is not sufficient to rule that out.
What confounders would you suggest? Elsewhere in the thread you've been suggesting it's a founder effect. It should be plainly obvious why it's not that, nor something you could attribute to a single super-spreader event.
Reading the latest document out, I can't rule out sampling bias, and the methodology used to gather data is also vulnerable to bias (get samples which are PCR-negative for the S gene, but positive to other genes, which is, by their own admission, a poor proxy).
The confidence intervals shown by PHE on potential increased transmissibility are also very wide (not the ones from the NERVTAG minutes, but the new analyses by PHE).
It needs larger sampling (already doing so, I'm sure) and some biological evidence.
How would sampling error lead to the relative prevalence growing from 0% to 60% in a smooth exponential curve over 1-2 months?
My understanding on data gathering is that there have been two data sources: sequencing a 10% sample of the positive results, and using the fortuitous point about the three-target PCR tests showing one of the targets as negative for all such tests. Having two data sources is useful since the results from the sequencing are delayed by weeks.
But up to the point where they have both sets of data, the relative prevalence lines up very neatly. In particular, it cannot be that these results are coming from some other variant with the same 69-70 deletion.
(I don't think it's fair to suggest they implied it was a poor proxy in general. They said it was a poorer proxy the further back in time you go.)
Re: confidence intervals, the data they have from the relative prevalence of the new variant has pretty tight confidence intervals (95% CI: 1.34-1.59 R). That makes sense, because the modeling for that is really simple.
The confidence interval for trying to correlate prevalence of the variant vs growth rates is indeed quite wide. But it makes sense, because that's noisy data.
Yes, more data and more evidence will always be great. How many weeks are you willing to wait for it, before putting in new measures? How will that delay affect the epidemic curve if the findings so far are correct?
I don't know enough about epidemiology but I would imagine they have done modelling to determine the likely transmissibility or R number of this new variant to be 70% higher. The probability that this new variant has come to dominate by pure chance must be small.
You are right that London is a densely populated area prone to easy spread for the virus but the same must be true for all variants. This variant started its existence as a single strand of viral DNA and has managed to spread far enough to become the dominant strand against competition from many other well established variants.
This variant was not dominant in London some weeks ago, and now is.
> Could it still be that this variant is as infectious as others, but just happens to be the dominant one in the regions where the virus circulates the most, for reasons that have nothing to do with the genetics of the virus?
Yes, but one assumes that confounding factors like that are fairly easy to isolate. At some point, especially as the growth continues, statistics pretty much rules out other explanations. General consensus is that this is almost certainly more infectious. But sure, there's always more science to do.
> Could it still be that this variant is as infectious as others, but just happens to be the dominant one in the regions where the virus circulates the most, for reasons that have nothing to do with the genetics of the virus?
That can happen when general incidence is very low, in a small region, or for a short time. But this is not any more the case here, and having this happening by chance is very unlikely.
Sure, there's constant mutation and most of it is phenotypically meaningless. What caused the concern is that this particular set of mutations seem to be associated with a part of the country where the measured dose-response of lockdown measures suddenly went way down. In other words, the effectiveness of a particular set of lockdown measures seemed to suddenly go down in Kent and London but not other parts of the country including parts of the country that had previously shown similar responses to lockdown measures. Either everyone in Kent is suddenly breaking the rules more than people elsewhere, this is unfortunate random variation driven by a few super spreading events (totally possible), or this is the first phenotypically distinct variant (as opposed to irrelevant sequence mutations) which has emerged.
Let's hope it's nothing but I'm glad that measures have been taken now.
AFAIK, this strand is different because of the number of mutations. See figure 2 here https://virological.org/t/preliminary-genomic-characterisati...
This is a really good report on the new strain, and I urge everyone to read it.
Also, the UK seems to do way more sequencing of the virus than any other country, so one would expect such cherry picking to actually happen in the UK.
According to the Danish Serum Institute, the UK is sequencing about 10% of the positive test results. The UK is considered a leader in this field in Europe including the British Isles.
For comparison, the Danish Serum Institute has a sequencing capacity about 5000 positive tests a week, a rate of around 25% of the positives at the current level.
Source, in Danish, from the Serum Institute:
https://www.ssi.dk/aktuelt/nyheder/2020/ny-covid-virusstamme...
New Zealand is achieving over 80% sequencing and more recently has gone over 90%. It's possibly more important when you have less cases so that you can find connections and react to them. It's also a lot easy to do when you have very few cases (<10 versus 30k+).
https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/checkpoint/audio/2...
It is more likely that this is noted first in the UK. This means that there is some likelihood that it already exists in other countries, but was not notices yet.
However, this does not explains away that it appears to have much higher transmission.
Also the UK detected this new strain right next to the Dover Crossing - Isn't it pretty likely it came from mainland Europe and was detected at our port rather than we coincidentally had a mutation right on the border?
Looks like it's probably the opposite.
> The variant can be found across the UK, except Northern Ireland, but it is heavily concentrated in London, the South East and eastern England. Cases elsewhere in the country do not seem to have taken off.
> Data from Nextstrain, which has been monitoring the genetic codes of the viral samples around the world, suggest cases in Denmark and Australia have come from the UK. The Netherlands has also reported cases.
Wales was reporting this variant as seen in all regions on Sunday, hence the lock down.
As far as I understand, that is what happened with previous concerns about mutated strains. In the end they turned out to be no different than the wildtype, and greate distribution was simply because those strains were present in populations that caused more spreading.
There is not enough data right now to be sure whether this new strain is more infectious or not, but from what I read there are a few more reasons to be concerned this time compared to the previous times when mutated strains were reported.
My layman's interpretation is that variants are kind of a stepping stone to a strain. Viruses do mutate constantly, but I would guess that many (maybe most) of those mutations are effectively a no-op. It's a mutation in a dormant region, so it does nothing. Of the mutations that occur in an active region, some will be bad, and those mutations die out.
So I would think we're really only concerned with mutations in active regions that impact viability. We don't really care about mutations that decrease viability, since they'll generally be overcome by more viable versions of the virus naturally.
The question with this particular mutation is whether it's a variant or a strain. I.e. is this new variant more infectious? Which would make it a strain, not a variant.
Not really. Thousands of variations have ben sequenced, the notable thing here is the (potentially) faster spread.
Whilst the consensus seems to be that this variant is spreading faster than other variants - is there any information on exactly how it does so?
Not really. But this variant does have novel mutations in sections coding for spike proteins. Whether and how those are functional improvements for the virus are tbd.
See https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.12.16.423118v1
Increase in the number of spikes per virus.
Yeah, i read somewhere 70%.
Just in time for Christmas too.
Based on the precedent of all other endemic human coronaviruses, there is reason to guess that the winning mutations will be less dangerous. This is also consistent with theory:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4873896/
> By far, the most widely studied trade-off involves transmission and virulence (Anderson and May, 1982; Frank, 1996; Alizon et al. 2009).
The strains being transmitted the most are likely to keep the host the most healthy for the longest time.
However, this is only true in the LONG RUN, when different variants have played out for a while.
In the short term, there could be a highly transimissible strain with a much higher mortality. It will eventually come to a point when the most common strains in a population are milder strains... but one of the reasons that happens is that hosts with immune systems unable to handle the strain die off... and those who survive do so because they can handle it better. So, at a later stage, it looks like the virus got milder, but:
- it doesn't generally apply to all strains
- the strains look mild later because only those for whom it was mild survive
Exactly. There exists a really good example for that, the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918.
You’ve traded parasites here for viruses. What about bacteria?
I find it completely disappointing and disheartening that the west has done almost nothing to curb the virus, thus increasing the chance of mutation and continued spread. It's just hard to see the pointing of fingers at China that's happened, especially in hindsight when it's unclear if it even began in China (which doesn't really matter anyway if it was a naturally occurring zoonotic crossover event) and not somewhere else like Italy, but the west has just rolled over to the threat of the virus in its response. Meanwhile, life in China has been basically normal for a while.
It further drives me crazy because I am still disconnected from my family because the U.S. still refuses to allow my fiancée to travel back (she lives and works in the U.S.) from the country best dealing with this to to the worst. It's just sickening there's no support for people like us, and now it looks like it can only get worse in the west.
Some of the finger pointing at China may be unfair but clearly they knew a lot about the virus while letting their citizens travel outside. Not that the West would’ve handled it any better necessarily but when you seed the world with virus there is going to be some blowback.
China restricted international flights out of Wuhan on January 23rd. The US didn't restrict flights out even now with much higher incidence.
They were also highly restricting travel internally as well, already doing temperature checks on major roads.
Not only this, they restricted travel from Wuhan region to other parts of China, while at the same time not restricting travel abroad.
They did restrict travel abroad. The US had to send a special plane to evacuate people because they had stopped international flights. And then the Us failed to strictly quarantine them and also the evacuating team according to a whistleblower didn't use proper PPE.
It should be kept in mind (without unnecessary enmity or antagonism, just as a fact) that almost a year later we still do not definitively know the origins of the virus. That position is reflected in WHO’s Terms of References for the relevant study[0], for example.
Note that the document appears to imply that WHO’s team will not be allowed to operate on the ground in China to collect evidence (see Phase 1 of Implementation plan, the paragraph about building on existing information and not duplicating existing efforts).
Note that the document does not mention the possibility of lab escape, despite documented evidence of SARS-CoV previously escaping from a lab in Beijing and resulting in at least one death years earlier, and the fact that Wuhan is home to another one of the very few BSL–4 labs.
I am tired of uninformed “who dealt it” finger-pointing as much as the next guy. First, we currently lack information. Second, even if we had that information, we should accept that mistakes happen (human factor and so on).
The only valid grounds for finger-pointing, as far as I’m concerned, is if someone attempts to undermine an effort aimed to make humanity better equipped to deal with a similar scenario in future.
[0] https://www.who.int/publications/m/item/who-convened-global-...
China had much more experience with SARS and could understand the risk it poses to their economy and population. With strict government control they can exert and massive resources, they could curb the spread. It's almost comical to look at their total number of cases (80 000) compared to new daily cases today (in USA alone 200 000).
I also find it disappointing that people still think that blindly applying measures that may work in one case, will work in any other case. It's like countries don't have different cultures, different climate, geography, demography, political systems and so on. And people still think that taking one set of rules that work in one context we can just apply them anywhere and have the same result.
I heard this quote on a podcast recently, and somehow stuck with me, because it's quite amazing how we think that we can control somehow such a force of nature like a new virus: “Man cannot control the current of events. He can only float with them and steer.” Otto Von Bismarck.
> I also find it disappointing that people still think that blindly applying measures that may work in one case, will work in any other case. ... And people still think that taking one set of rules that work in one context we can just apply them anywhere and have the same result.
Where was that suggested?
The US is a free country. China is an authoritarian dictatorship.
The most alarming thing to me is the public appetite for authoritarian policies.
I mean, you're not wrong about China and authoritarianism, but calling US free at this point I think is a mild exaggeration. Corporatocracy might be more apt
You totally underestimate the amount of influence and propaganda enacted by corporations and the government in the U.S.
Secondly, why is this an excuse to totally fail at handling the pandemic and to let the economy fail?
Always err on the side of freedom and individual liberty, always.
And Taiwan?
A good visualization of the mutations, including the South African one that isn't related, but also increasing:
https://nextstrain.org/groups/neherlab/ncov/S.N501?c=gt-S_50...
I think most people seem to be underestimating just how bad this is. During the recent 4-week lockdown it was already clear that something odd was going on in Kent; whilst case counts were dropping in the rest of the country, they continued to rise significantly there. Something was clearly different.
Now high case counts are spreading from the South East into the rest of the country. We don't know whether we can even stop the growth. During the last lockdown schools remained open; I suspect that it may be necessary to close them in order to just stop the growth. A significant reduction in cases looks impossible.
This strain has probably already spread to tens of other countries. Every country which is just about holding things together, whatever their strategy, is going to struggle with a significantly more transmissible variant of the virus.
I don't disagree, but it would be really nice if we could classify lockdowns better. The original lockdown furloughed a LOT of workers, closed schools and closed virtually all shops. Today's "super tier 4+ lockdown" doesn't seem to apply to shops at all (my local shops were all open this morning, is wrapping paper really an "essential"?). Workers are mostly going in. Schools that have remained open unless they already closed and childcare is still running.
They've basically just shut restaurants. That's the only change I can see...
I've posted elsewhere that my cynical view of the UK gov approach is that they are talking tough and doing nothing. So maybe I'm biased?
Perhaps a move transmissible strain will force real action?
On my walk to work this morning, I detoured down a local main street, curious to see what shops were considering themselves 'essential' and remaining open.
Apparently this time around, travel agents and jewellery sellers have added themselves to the list, with a few barbers clearly operating illicitly behind half-drawn shutters.
I was bemused by the very chi-chi local middle class deli near my home insisting they'd be staying open when I enquired on Saturday evening. I mean, sure they sell food, but really - I'm unsure how vital to survival artisanal cheese and pasta is!
Bluntly, without the sincere threat of fines or whatever, no action will be taken. UK-dwellers' sense of entitlement to 'freedoms' seems drastically diluted compared to what I witnessed on the continent a few months back, when I was able.
We deserve everything we get.
- ed, whups - clearly I meant something like 'drastically inflated', not 'diluted'.
> I was bemused by the very chi-chi local middle class deli near my home insisting they'd be staying open when I enquired on Saturday evening. I mean, sure they sell food, but really - I'm unsure how vital to survival artisanal cheese and pasta is!
Let's not repeat the mistakes of the first lockdown. If you close down too many places, all that causes is everyone cramming into the same few places still open, causing superspreader events. At one point, LA shut down outdoor farmers markets and many cities including London slashed their public transit schedules, leading to overpacked busses and trains.
In the march/april stage of the pandemic, I chose to shop at such "shi-shi" places exclusively because a) there were no lineups, b) their non-frozen supply chain meant they had to sell meat or it would rot, c) they were owned by people with families in the neighbourhood/city, and d) the higher prices kept out hoarders, panic buyers, and the mentally ill.
On the last point, there was almost always some psycho causing problems in the regular supermarket because it appealed to their sense of drama and got them attention. The extra %15-20 was worth avoiding the risk of an altercation.
The contempt some people have for local shopowners who provide services that are actually worth a premium is shocking, albeit typically british.
I assume not, but if your final sentence was aimed at my tongue-in-cheek appraisal of the value of chi-chi delis (which, obviously, i was shopping in) during a pandemic, then please appreciate that I also today spent 35 minutes waiting in a queue for a local butcher and over the past months have been highly appreciative of my local Turkish-run mini-market.
I'm not sure I do think it's a British thing to hate on local shopowners, if anything - the opposite, what with us being a nation of them, and all.
Sure major Supermarkets have captured most of the spend, but that's just the way things are. Convenience comes in different forms.
Not addressing your main points, but that is a seriously prejudiced view of people struggling with mental illness. Mentally ill people aren’t “psychos”, many people in all walks of life struggle with anxiety, depression or something else. That’s not to say violent people don’t have underlying mental health issues. It’s quite an outdated view that mentally ill people are distinct from “normal” people, and aren’t just people who’ve suffered trauma. What happens if you find yourself dealing with these issues, are you going to shame yourself into not seeking treatment?
During a public emergency with uncertainty like the beginning of the pandemic, a person who becomes physically aggressive in a supermarket, makes a point of coughing and spitting on shelves and aisles, and threatens the cashiers and stock staff everyone else depends on, because they want to provoke a confrontation that makes them feel powerful - does not earn sympathy.
Equating people experiencing depression with those who have violent delusions and borderline tendencies creates a worse stigma on seeking treatment than recognizing that dangerous people are just plain dangerous. Sure, we're all people etc, but in an emergency, there are men and women you can trust, and there are ones you can't. A psycho is someone who threatens or harms others for gratification, and it is an epithet they earn. If that's "prejudiced," perhaps we're just from different cultures.
The stakes change when there was a reasonable threat that their actions could put people and their families at risk.
You're attacking a straw man of your own invention here. In casual use (like above), "psycho" means somebody acting in a bizarre or dangerous manner, eg. trying to buy all the toilet paper in the store and not taking "no" for an answer. Nothing to do with actual mental illness.
Obviously the etymology of the term comes from psychological illness via a certain famous Hitchhock movie, and that's one reason why the term du jour these days is "Karen" instead.
The way things were announced in the UK, they just set up for what India did: a no-notice lockdown that causes people to disperse on crowded trains. Oops.
Am I right in saying that the goal of any lockdown is not to completely stop the spread of the virus, but to instead merely keep hospitals from filling up?
The health of the population, in general, is not the primary concern. We just need to stop the hospitals from collapsing.
We live with all manner of sickness and disease every day of the year without trying to eradicate them. Covid is only different from heart disease, lung cancer, and rabies in that it has the potential to swamp us.
Adjusting the throttle for spread might mean jewelry shops being open but sandwich shops being closed. It might just as well involve lockdown for anyone born in an odd month, or with a name ending in a vowel, or ginger hair. The measures are arbitrary and only used as a throttle for the inevitable spread.
This is how I sleep at night. The alternative is the worrying thought that no one in power really knows what they are doing.
Lockdown had a variety of goals but the current situation can generally be classed as a policy failure. Hospital collapse is the worst case scenario but isn’t the only goal. Other important goals include:
* keeping schools open (mostly a success)
* avoiding economic disruption (mixed, tending towards failure)
* avoiding unnecessary deaths and long run health issues (failure)
* Avoiding a second lockdown and the related uncertainty and stress (failure)
* returning to normal life (failure)
* avoiding dangerous mutations (failure)
The UK is an island and could have fairly easily done a NZ/Australia strategy over the summer when seasonality made elimination easy. Jurisdictions that made that choice are doing better on all front.
I live in one such jurisdiction (atlantic canada) and we’ve spent less time in lockdown, had a good economy, and mostly avoided deaths and hospitalizations. Seems a clear winner.
Perhaps a country in the middle of europe couldn’t have done it but the Uk certainly could have.
And no, this pretty clearly shows govts had no long run or even medium run strategy. Europe will be in rolling lockdowns till april or so, because of a premature declaration of victory in the summer.
It is way easier to leave the UK than it is to leave Australia/NZ - there are only the airways and no roads or ferries.
Ireland was interested in doing covid zero, but the uk wasn’t, other than scotland.
So once you exclude ireland, you have the channel tunnel, and a handful of ferries to france/belgium. All of which arrive at terminals and where you can do tests or register people for isolation requirements.
Australia and nz aren’t the only successes. You also have taiwan and vietnam. Very close to china, and vietnam has land borders. The biggest difference is these countries tried.
The West simply has not demonstrated the ability to enact an actual lockdown. So we're stuck with these half-measures, that rely on minimum-wage store greeters for enforcement, and even those get protested.
> Am I right in saying that the goal of any lockdown is not to completely stop the spread of the virus, but to instead merely keep hospitals from filling up?
The lockdown in New Zealand had that goal to stop it completely, and achieved it.
Also, it is in general not impossible to eradicate a contagion and suppress it completely. For example, this was done with smallpox, which is about as transmissible SARS-COV2. Smallpox has been eradicated world-wide, for a quite modest price.
> UK-dwellers' sense of entitlement to 'freedoms'
Seriously?
We (the West, I'm not from the UK) are losing our freedom at an unimaginable speed even a few years ago and you think freedom is negotiable? I find this appalling how easy we ease into a dictatorship everywhere in Europe.
It's interesting that no one seems to give a shit about real freedoms like free speech or democracy, detention without trial or access to lawyers. But when you close the pubs (or the artisnal pasta makers), suddenly we're on a dictatorship.
This is so unjust: you don't know me but you basically reduce me to an angry guy that can't get drunk with his friends.
ALL our freedoms are attacked: the social media censorship reached crazy levels lately, and let's not talk about democracy given the disgusting spectacle the US has shown this year (my country doesn't fare any better).
When someone is condemned to financial ruin because her shop is not allowed to open, this is not a matter of self entitlement, yes I think these are the beginnings of dictatorship.
As I said I'm not from the UK but as far as I know people in London had more freedom during the WWII aerial bombings.
There was never a "freedom to post" on social media, so you haven't lost that. The idea of "freedom of speech" was formed during a period of time when there were natural barriers to speech such that bat shit crazy qanon conspiracy theories and other such nonsense couldn't propagate widely. Nobody ever intended "freedom of speech" to equal a right to use a frictionless machine to propagate lies to billions.
Prior to the internet you could for the most part visually distinguish between the crazy and the legitimate - the crazy was in crayon on cardboard scraps, full of misspellings. The higher quality crazy was type written on a misaligned sheet of paper, thick with whiteout, still full of misspellings. The legit was professionally edited and published. Not 100% of the time, but a good fraction of the time.
Now we have spell checkers and grammar checkers and blog services like medium that make everything look really really good. That visual heuristic is gone. We need a way to invert our current equilibrium of "it is easy to get bad information out, and hard to get good information out" at least back to how it was: "it is hard to get good information out, but it is even harder to get really bad information out." That isn't censorship.
As for democracy in the US, as a US citizen I can tell you it is on the ropes, mostly due to social media, but it is better off today than it was four years ago just because people are at least starting to think about how to get social media under control.
Every freedom my parents, grandparents, and great grandparents had I have, and more. I'm hard pressed to identify a single one that is under attack.
So far the outcome of the "disgusting spectacle" in the US has provided evidence against the risk of incipient dictatorship, not for it. States mobilized to various degrees of success to enable voting despite the pandemic, and the result was the highest turnout since 1900.
And you should really familiarize yourself with the actual government response in the UK and US during World War II. The censorship regime was extensive, far more so than anything we've seen in recent memory:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Censorship
Furthermore, rationing of food, fuel, and other commodities was extensive. In the UK, this included substantial control of the operating hours, prices, and even the menus of restaurants.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationing_in_the_United_Kingdo...
When someone is condemned to financial ruin because her shop is not allowed to open, this is not a matter of self entitlement, yes I think these are the beginnings of dictatorship.
On the other hand, people are actually dying of Covid. Given the choice I'd take financial ruin over death.
Frankly, people are always dying. Deaths don't automatically outweigh everything. This logic quickly breaks down once you apply it consistently. Traffic accidents are a huge cause of deaths, yet we don't ban all vehicles.
There are massive costs associated with lockdowns, most of which we can probably only judge accurately once everything is over, and certainly there are second order effects which cost lives also. Such as suicides due to depression amplified by social isolation.
Those costs should be factored in. It's not as simple as a blanket "people are dying so everything is justified".
You're talking about death as something abstract. I'm not. I'm saying I would prefer not to die, even if it costs the economy a lot.
Perhaps you'd give up your life, or your child or partner or parent, to save a handful of jobs but that's quite weird in my opinion. Economies can be rebuilt. Dead people can't be brought back.
The situation as it is does not pit option A: "you die right now" vs. option B: "save a handful of jobs". You are still oversimplifying the issue. In reality, both options are just modifying chances, and both options entail a huge number of second order effects. This needs to be weighed. It's not as simple as saying "well option A is literal death, so the other must always be better". And pointing that out does not mean I'd die to save a handful of jobs.
The flu also kills hundreds of thousands of people, and it does so each and every year. So should we be in permanent lockdown? After all, it's lives versus a handful of jobs.
How many of those suicides are from people who are broke for pandemic-related reasons, and could've been prevented had we controlled the pandemic early (i.e, with a strict lockdown)?
Devils advocate: how many of those suicides are caused directly by the restrictions and not the pandemic, how many extra would have lost their sanity due to a stricter lockdown?
Truth is we're not taking much time to measure the non-covid, non economic outcomes
The whole point of a strict lockdown would've been to nip the problem in the bud via drastic measures. Based on the experiences of other countries, it should've lasted about 3-4 weeks.
I think this idea is idealistic. It's easy to say now that we should've reacted immediately. But try just getting public support for drastic lockdown measures when the virus was new enough to have about as much impact on people's daily lives as the latest hospital bombing somewhere in Afghanistan.
I lost my sanity during this year's "lockdowns".
I wish you the best. Hope you get better.
Why does there have to be a dichotomy here? Another option would be to lock down but also to provide for people who will otherwise be ruined by the lockdown.
That seems to be the most humane option. Make it illegal to evict people, provide them with a reasonable base income that allows them to lead a dignified life through the lockdown, and then shut everything down for a little while.
Suggesting that the lockdown is synonymous with loss of livelihood is exactly the problem here. Surely the same elected officials that have the power to close everything down also have the power to authorize emergency payments to those impacted by the lockdown.
> Another option would be to lock down but also to provide for people who will otherwise be ruined by the lockdown.
Well, that's will just establish a beachhead for socialism, and that is reserved for big business.
During Rationing, you mean?
Yes. During rationing.
In the Netherlands, although not in every city, in some COVID-19 is an excuse for banning demonstrations.
It was made law in the UK
Hence my enclosing Freedoms in single quotes.
I tend to communicate quite drily - that's often hard to put across online.
I think you're exactly correct.
It drives me nuts when people talk about freedom, they have no actual idea what freedom is or takes and their actions undermine it. Freedom doesn't mean "I can do whatever I like with no consequences", but that's what people really want.
Freedom is just a better sounding word than selfishness these days :(
<Steps-down-from-soapbox>
>Freedom doesn't mean "I can do whatever I like with no consequences"
Depends on your definition of freedom. The issue with this kind of freedom is that your freedom encroaches on other people's freedoms, so most societies agreed that we should have less freedom in favor of fairness.
Exactly where the trade-off is to be made is subjective and cannot be derived from facts alone.
We have a lot of freedoms that encroach on other people's freedoms, it's impossibly to make a clear cut on where fair ends and personal freedom begins.
Allowing people the freedom to sell sugar will inevitably lead to more diabetes and earlier death. It tastes good and it's addictive.
Sugar costs a lot of people some of their freedom to live and move. But if we didn't allow selling sugar we would take away the seller's freedom and the freedom to choose from the consumer.
Your sugar example is no good. Sugar doesn’t take people’s freedoms away. It has no agency and doesn’t enforce anything. Like any action, eating sugar may have consequences good or bad for the individual, but that has nothing to do with freedoms unless the government starts telling people they may not eat more than x grams per day or something like that.
In the case of masks and lockdowns the "freedom" in question is more analogous to drunk driving. This is in the sense that exercising the freedom could cause the people around you some severe life-altering problems, and you're imposing that risk without their consent or knowledge.
That's always been the case. Thousands of people die every year from influenza spread by asymptomatic carriers. COVID-19 is more deadly, but that's just a difference in degree. Where do we draw the line?
Without their knowledge or consent? You can’t tell whether people are wearing masks and make a decision about whether to be around them? I suspect that even a blind person could do so the moment somebody started talking.
I’m sure there are still better comparisons than drunk driving. If you are under 55, the risk is about the same as dying from a car accident.
Cue Mel Gibson as William Wallace.
To many people democracy is just a means to an end. And the end goal is a simple life with simple pleasures.
Re the deli and other quasi essential shops, it would seem unfair if they closed when you can still buy your fancy cheese and olives in a supermarket.
The issue isn't really whether that shop is essential. The issue is that the greeting card store next door is also open, because they've decided they're essential. And none of these stores (including the super market) is enforcing mask requirements because none of the others are and they don't want to be the only one.
In 1000 little steps you are suddenly miles away from a real lockdown. You're basically BAU, but the pub is shut ever other week (unless you buy a scotch egg in which case it is also essential).
I don't care if people are eating gourmet olives. But we need to realise that making excuses for doing nothing is still doing nothing.
It's essential to the owners or their employees, who may risk losing their home if they can't make a living.
Lockdowns have gone on long enough that people are deciding to risk it because they have far more pressing concerns.
I don't know why you expect it to be fair. The policy needs to be effective first and foremost. Schemes like furlough are there to support people who are most affected.
> I mean, sure they sell food, but really - I'm unsure how vital to survival artisanal cheese and pasta is!
I suppose we could close all food shops other than Asda, and restrict Asda to selling only their most basic range (and no sweets, chocolate, fizzy drinks, etc- after all, you can survive without those). On the other hand, that would mean that Asda would be more crowded as people who normally shop in your "chi-chi local middle class deli" now have to go there.
The chance of transmission in a small, quiet deli is significantly less than in a crowded supermarket. Several older residents in our town have switched from the Co-op to the local deli for exactly that reason. Unless you’re going to start deeming what food is essential and what isn’t, then your distinction is counter-productive.
> I've posted elsewhere that my cynical view of the UK gov approach is that they are talking tough and doing nothing. So maybe I'm biased?
It's felt like this with all of the tiers to be honest.
They just don't go far enough and the populace is fed up with taking much heed of the rules too.
The November "lockdown" felt very, very different to March when the roads etc were quiet - and it actually felt like people were taking this seriously.
I have to be careful I don't wander into conspiracy theories but...
I'm fed up because so many people flout the rules with no consequences. I suspect that the lack of consequences is intentional. If everyone flours the rules, the economic hit will be smaller and Bojo can claim he did something and its not his fault no one listened. The government have created a situation where the only logical action for normal people is business as usual, that means large excess deaths, and the government has plausible deniability. Whoops.
/RantAndParanoia
> I'm fed up because so many people flout the rules with no consequences.
Been that way since Barnard's Castle.
The latest decision that says MPs can see their siblings for Christmas Dinner on the 25th, but a Nurse working on the 25th can't see their parent with terminal cancer for dinner on the 26th, will hopefully be ignored.
What's especially funny is the latest Tier 4 Health Protection legislation has a specific exception for groups meeting in the grounds of castles...
I can't believe it hasn't made headlines yet...
I think it’s existed longer? I remember reading some legislation during the November lockdown thinking that the Gov is trolling us.
> If everyone flours the rules, the economic hit will be smaller
Only assuming that there's no economic hit to a rampant pandemic spreading death, hospitalisation and illness. Which is a barking mad assumption. It never was "illness vs economy" you either have both good, or you have neither good. They can't be separated.
The people dying from the virus are the old, sick and fat. Not a population that adds much to the economy.
Depending on long term health effects if covid runs wild you can see as many benefits to average people at the end of it as you did after the black death.
> The people dying from the virus are the old, sick and fat.
It's not that simple. It's never that simple: i.e. you have simplified to the point of being flat wrong.
> Depending on long term health effects if covid runs wild you can see as many benefits to average people at the end of it as you did after the black death
I don't know what you mean there, for one thing prevalent Long COVID is really not going to be net benefit, for another you should perhaps rethink your economic argument for genocide / decimation. And your assumption about who is "in groups" / "average people" vs out groups. Your whole line of thinking is lacking in both logic and human decency.
>I don't know what you mean
And yet that didn't stop you from moralizing.
And you haven't yet started thinking in moral ways, but also your nihilistic desire has stopped you from seeing the logical truth: There are countries that both have the COVID virus under control and also have their economy back on track; and there are countries that have achieved neither. There is no "one or the other". It is "control the virus and benefit economically, or get neither benefit".
Morality is a sound people make when they have nothing to defend their position with.
I hear your sound loud and clear. It is noise.
There was a decent drop in cases in November from what I can see. You’re right though, the first lock down felt very different.
Sadly the rules are laxer than they should be but the government can’t enforce the rules effectively so are putting in enough grey-area that people can sort of decide for themselves.
Sadly people are very short term focussed and unable to make the most of the situation and instead complain and go about their normal lives with just enough changes that they “feel like they’re doing their bit”.
I love the gym but the move to “keep gyms open” was the best example of people not really getting it and being sad that their toys had been taken away.
The moto in our hose at the moment is “just because you can doesn’t mean you should”
People are very short term focused on things like; not losing their houses, not losing their businesses, maintaining their families, maintaining their mental health, looking after children.
I don't know your situation, but I have lived a very isolated existance for the last 9 months because I am able to. MANY people I know are not in this position.
Couldn't agree more. People who have already isolated in previous lockdowns, and lost income, probably can't afford to play it safe. Expecially if they percieve the risk of Covid to be less than the financial risk of playing it safe.
I wasn’t referring to things people HAVE to do to survive - I’m talking about stuff they don’t have to do but want to do because they “just want to be back to normal”
Schools were still open, and building sites - which made a very significant difference to movement and traffic.
However, if you look at the graphs the dynamic of virus growth did seem to be significantly changed by the intervention.
Citymapper mobility index is quite interesting for quantifying level of lockdown.
As a programmer / software engineer, I've found that I often look for equivalency with policy and whatnot, because it seems like there are lots of similarities.
The impression that I get from my country (The Netherlands) is that we are doing a bit better than the UK for reasons that nobody quite understands yet. The best I can guess is that we ultimately make 'bigger' choices comparatively, even though compared to many other EU countries we're not doing particularly well despite being one of the richer ones.
The way I see it, our country is run by technocrats who are faced with something very different and new. Like with projects I've worked on as a programmer, the best solution often involved going way off course. And like with projects I've worked on, this usually didn't happen.
Solutions were conservative, even if something more drastic seemed prudent to almost everyone involved. It's really fucking hard to rewrite some of the core code. So instead we address things further away from that core with all sorts of special cases.
If anything, the pandemic has shown that our current way of doing things isn't quite equipped to deal with big upsets, and considering the future this is something we should probably prioritize dealing with somehow.
I feel like a lockdown rating system to compare what various countries and states are doing would be helpful to those outside. Something like +1 for closed retail, +1 for closed schools, +3 when outdoor exercise isn't allowed, +0.5 for recommending WFH, etc. So many times you hear on the news that x is in lockdown when they really aren't.
It was only a lockdown in name. Schools were in. Shops were open. Ministers have even been supplying pubs with methods to skirt the rules (scotch eggs ffs).
Not saying it's not bad, just that very little is actually being done to prevent the spread. Govt care more about keeping people in work.
Yet it worked well. In Cheshire (not badly hit), daily cases halved between the start of lockdown and end, having doubled in the previous month. In Cumbria it was even more of a drop
Overnight covid paitents in the NW went from a peak above that of April in Mid November (i.e. had caught it in October), dropping to 70% of the peak a month later, same in NE+Yorks.
The efficacy of action is directly related to your starting density. That is to say a mild lockdown is effective on a sparse caseload.
But there were places where one in a hundred was a contagious carrier. Stay at home was the only thing that would worked well. They're still not at that point, plans are still to return schools in T4 and as others testify, most shops ignore the rules. It's shambolic.
> I think most people seem to be underestimating just how bad this is.
No, there is no reason to panic yet. Concern, perhaps, but not panic.
There are a truckload of confounding factors in the middle, including potential "founder effects" (when a variant becomes dominant because it is the first to take hold, and just outruns the others out of larger starting numbers).
There is not yet solid proof of "70% more transmissible" given that all the data there are is the SAGE meeting minutes. We don't know from where the data came from, and how the estimations were made. There are huge uncertainties.
Until the biological analyses are done, one needs to keep their cool. Sadly, that wasn't what the UK government did.
Founder effects don't explain why this new strain took over as the dominant strain in London.
Even if we suppose the chance of it being as bad as suggested is only 50%, we should panic now, rather than waiting until we have solid proof and risk having a public health disaster.
Personally I suspect the UK didn't panic in its announcement and that this situation had been under surveillance for some weeks.
The confidence intervals go as low as 37% and as high as ~120%. That's a load of uncertainty.
Also the latest document by PHE highlights also the limitations of the current data behind modeling (PCR negative for the S gene, but positive for the others). At this point the good questions haven't been answered yet.
Without proper statistical analysis and epidemiological modelling this is nothing more than an anecdote. The last twelve months should really have taught us not to trust those.
It's fortunate that Pfizer/BioNTech chose the whole spike protein mRNA as their vaccine candidate over the one that focused just on the receptor binding domain -- which the UK mutation changed. Wise choice, and hopefully it will work well against this new variant. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2027906
Moderna's vaccine was focused on the whole spike protein too. So even though there are crucial mutations in this mutation, both leading vaccine candidates hopefully will still be effective.
For those interested in looking at the raw data, https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/interactive-map is a useful visualisation of cases by region, over time.
I am not from UK but I think this is an important and critical information. How is the daily deaths chart in Kent and London?
Deaths will be visible later on than infections but by now there should be a visible effect if IFR/CFR is different. If there is no visible difference it's possible that R0 increased while IFR remains steady (which is bad enough).
> This strain has probably already spread to tens of other countries. Every country which is just about holding things together, whatever their strategy, is going to struggle with a significantly more transmissible variant of the virus.
Yes. If the new variant is duplicating every week even under medium lock-down measures, as it appears, it will be very difficult to contain it, and impossible with the current set of measures. It would require a very strict lock-down at least. And the vaccinenes would not yet help - they will help later but probably not before late Summer, while the new variant will very likely be all over Europe until March.
Thinking about what we know, what appears very likely, and the conclusions of it, the first half of the year will be far away from normal, even catastrophic.
I think what most people has is issues with resolving double binds; there’s only one way out and it’s hard lockdown with rationing, which kind of require willful sacrifices, of jobs to say super least.
The general public anywhere isn’t ready for trolley problems even if told to optimize for least body counts. Basically the whole free world is in disbelief of the story that there are people on tracks(except TW/AU/NZ?).
> We don't know whether we can even stop the growth
I think extreme lockdown measures could, but they'd almost have to be indefinite, and there's no appetite for that.
>During the last lockdown schools remained open
Honestly, that doesn't sound like a real lockdown at all.
People really need to stop using the l-word. It grossly overstates what's happening. They called it that here in the USA too, and it was just as ridiculous. We had these so-called Stay At Home orders, which had tons of exceptions and were both ignored by the population and unenforced by the government. They might as well have been called Stay At Home Suggestions.
An actual sustained lock-down would likely stop the virus's spread, allowing us to finally get back to normal. But nobody wants to claim ownership of the economic fallout, so instead they do these half-assed lock-downs which don't really accomplish much besides making the government look like they're doing something.
>During the recent 4-week lockdown it was already clear that something odd was going on in Kent; whilst case counts were dropping in the rest of the country, they continued to rise significantly there. Something was clearly different.
They said the same thing about overnight vote counts in Fulton County, GA... turns out it was nothing.
My worry is this: If you take a population where a virus is widespread and start vaccinating then the likelihood for a mutation that escapes the vaccination is much higher, had you instead taken a population where the virus not widespread and vaccinated there.
Is this correct?
UK has a widespread ongoing outbreak and is the first nation to deliver vaccinations at a big scale.
"first nation to deliver vaccinations at a big scale"
Yes, we are getting into it but something like 300K first jabs for a two jab vacc in two weeks is not going to set the world on fire. The logistics behind delivering the jab are absolutely breathtaking.
Here in the UK we are rich and have the science etc. We are a small, comparatively, densely populated place. We have a country funded health service and a fairly well funded military with experience and gear and man power. I think the UK represents one of the best possible case studies for mass vaccination.
60M people at 300K per week is 200 weeks or nearly four years - this is a very artificial example and only an illustration. To get 60M people jabbed, twice, in a few months is going to need a few resources!
The US is on target to have everyone that wants one jab'ed by June.
I'm not sure I follow.
Why would vaccination increase the likelihood of new mutations, or mutations surviving better?
The only way I can see that reasoning working is that the mutation was somehow vaccine resistant but not resistant to the immune reaction we get after being sick with the comon corona, but it is not obvious to me that it would work that way, I would assume the opposite.
Yeah this is sort of true on it's face, but doesn't really change anything. Of course if a virus is widely spread it's more likely to have vaccine escaping variants out there. If you vaccinate that population those vaccine escaping variants become dominant. Obviously this is less likely in a population with less cases. But you have to vaccinate that high case population eventually and the sooner you do it the better. No sense giving the virus more time to mutate.
>Why would vaccination increase the likelihood of new mutations, or mutations surviving better?
Our immune systems are general enough to face a wide variety of viruses, infections and strains.
When one is vaccinated, it gets prepared for that particular strain of a particular virus. The cost is that it could become more vulnerable to other infections... it's the cost/benefit of specialization vs generalization. Reference: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14970928/
The reason is that the immune system is highly optimized and it is optimized to be flexible enough to save enough individuals for the next generation. It is not optimized to save each and every individual against all possible infections. That is unnecessary, as far as evolution is concerned.
Having said that, vaccines generally don't weaken individuals to a slightly different variant of the same virus. It should rather strengthen it. The immune system expects the virus to mutate so it prepares for the mutations to an extent. In fact, a category of vaccines called live-attenuated vaccines are basically weakened strains of the same virus (these can sometimes mutate into dangerous strains, eg. https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/polio-vaccination..., but that's a different discussion).
If "normal" variant is more virulent, it should spread faster than other variants and will be dominant. If you vaccinate which eradicates "normal" variant than those less virulent strain which may be vaccine resistant will get opportunity to spread. That is if such variants exist.
Problem is that there is no alternative. You either vaccinate or let it run through your population. With IFR of 0.5-1% that is really hard choice to make.
> With IFR of 0.5-1% that is really hard choice to make.
I'm getting the sense that there's little public appetite for waiting another 6-9 months for a new vaccine. This might change as more people get the virus, but there's a good chance 10-15% of Americans have already had or currently have the virus, so if that didn't scare people already, I'm not sure if another month of full ICUs will.
This is the biggest problem. People are losing faith in the restrictions and are starting to believe into various conspiracy theories. Most of this is due to inability to distinguish between accurate and false information.
Another problem is that CDC and other agencies at first were openly lying and trying to downplay the virus or say how masks were not effective. This leads to people not trusting what they say because everyone can remember how they were against masks and now are in favor of masks. Then you add in politicians with mixed messages and you get highly doubtful public.
IFR is around 1% in the western world. That is incredibly high for something that could become as seasonal as flu.
VUI – 202012/01 on Wikipedia [1]:
> The first Variant Under Investigation in December 2020 (VUI – 202012/01), also known as lineage B.1.1.7, is a variant of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. The variant was first detected in the United Kingdom in October 2020 from a sample taken the previous month, and it quickly began to spread by mid-December. It is correlated with a significant increase in the rate of COVID-19 infection in England; this increase is thought to be at least partly because of mutation N501Y inside the spike glycoprotein's receptor-binding domain, which is needed for binding to ACE2 in human cells.
Correlation does not equal causation. Most of the northern hemisphere is experiencing a significant increase in cases, i.e., a second wave. It has not yet been established whether this variant exhibits a unique pathogenesis.
But it's not just about there being correlation between the variant appearing, and there being a new wave. That is a pretty weak data point by itself. We have more evidence and everything so far is pointing in the same direction.
The big deal to me is that this variant is muscling out others in sequencing (+ PCR tests which by coincidence can tell the difference between this variant and the previously dominant ones), despite there being a high prevalence.
And while the details are sparse, the NERVTAG minutes refer to evidence showing that the patients infected by the new variant have higher viral loads.
In this case, the B.1.1.7 variant has shown to be highly abundant in recent COVID-19 cases in the UK. Much higher compared to other mutations which are tracked too. This is pretty clear evidence of an increased infection rate or evolutionary advantage as there has to be some driving force for this process. Take a look at this Report from the COVID-19 Genomics UK Consortium. The B.1.1.7 mutations N501Y + Δ69-70 and N501Y are very recent and mostly showed up during the last 28 days.
[1] https://www.cogconsortium.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Repo...
That doesn't rule out a combination of slightly increased infectiousness and a founder effect, which is equally possible at this stage.
It's not just that there is an increase in cases after the mutation appeared. It's that in the regions where this mutation is prevalent there are many more cases than in other parts of the same country (and in fact case numbers are growing in regions with this variant and falling elsewhere). The other hint is that the new mutation is becoming the prevalent strain in south-east England, which on it's own would already indicate that it has an evolutionary advantage over other strains that allows it to outcompete them. Combined with everything else we know it seems clear that this advantage is faster spread.
> Correlation does not equal causation.
Yeah but if somebody is shot and you are found with a smoking gun right around the corner, you need to have a pretty good, and also testable explanation.
This Report from the COVID-19 Genomics UK Consortium gives a good summary of the prevalent genotypes with UK COVID-19 cases. You can see how the B.1.1.7 mutations N501Y + Δ69-70 and N501Y are very recent and mostly showed up during the last 28 days.
https://www.cogconsortium.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Repo...
The best reaction to this would be to pressure the NIH to lift the ban on the Astrazeneca vaccine. There is enough stockpiled supply to vaccinate most of the UK quickly and they would have a first mover advantage to getting a bunch of that vaccine. Evidence suggests this varient still has the same spike protein and seems like it would be still prevented by most if not all the vaccines.
The best reaction is to approve a vaccine which does not have a good proven track record? It hasn't been through complete Stage 3 trials, so we don't know if it works or if it works well.
I'm not saying that the Oxford/Astrazeneca vaccine is bad. This is however very unwise. It would definitely erode trust in vaccines if the Oxford/Astrazeneca were to have significant side effects. Which would erode trust in science in the long term.
Is there anyway to know if the vaccines are effective against the new strains?
As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, this is a variant, not a strain.
This variant does not have any genetic differences in the spike protein targeted by the vaccines. It is unlikely the vaccines will be differently effective.
> Table 1 provides details of the B.1.1.7 lineage-specific non-synonymous mutations and deletions. We note that many occur in the virus spike protein.
https://virological.org/t/preliminary-genomic-characterisati...
There is no evidence for or against this, seeing as the mutation is at most ten weeks old.
The question I'm most curious about: Does the vaccine(s) we've hustled to get developed, produced, and distributed over the last few months basically get invalidated because of the new strain?
No. There is a section in the article about that.
That's what I get for just skimming the first half of the article.. thanks.
My state has an Rt as high as London and people are running around like there is no epidemic at all. It's very frustrating.
The telegraph reckons it was spotted in Brazil earlier this year
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/12/21/supercharged-cov...
Viruses mutate constantly.
Vaccines target subsequences of amino acids on proteins which both variants most likely have.
Mark my words that this a non story/media sensationalism and will be out of the news in a few weeks.
I feel embarassed because people vilified my comment about Boris using this piece of news with a political cover motive. I am sorry, saying this is different than being a negationist. I hope more people get it now that I honestly try to explain myself better. Thanks.
The talk of the virus potentially being on a path to vaccine escape is very worrying. Sounds like we might end up in a situation where we have seasonal COVID like we do with the flu :(
At this point i heavy doubt we dont. If this mutation took place after one year, what will come in two or three.
That was the endpoint regardless. Almost no one thinks this is going to be a smallpox situation where the vaccine is so effective that the virus gets eradicated. Almost certainly, covid is going to turn into an endemic disease just like everything else. Remember: all diseases were novel once!
But most of the population will be immune, so outbreaks will be limited and spread slowly. Ideally that immunity will come via vaccination instead of infection. And yes, it remains possible that if it mutates as rapidly as influenza, that we'll need a yearly "covid shot" to plug the gap.
COVID has a replication checker so it will never mutate as fast as the flu.
Yearly shots will definitely be a thing.
I know I'm less afraid of it. More contagious generally means less deadly.
This sounds scientifically rigorous.
About as rigorous as the fear mongering in the media right now.
Why this comment? The very article linked is actually a solid, dispassionate treatment of questions exactly like this. It's not "fear mongering" at all, by any definition I'd be comfortable with. I think the media on the whole is doing a great job here, personally. Is there any particular "fear mongering" you'd like to call out?
I almost stopped commenting about it on HN, it feels like a wall of downvotes if you don't agree with the mainstream opinion.
We will have some very interesting textbooks about the mainstream public response to this in 50 years, I'm sure.
Doubtful. The victors write the history. The Church of “If It Saves Even One Life” and “Anti-Lockdown and Anti-Maskers are Murderers” are clearly the victors in this timeline. Your children and grandchildren will be taught about the backwards racists who were willing to sacrifice old people in the name of money, but how the fascist Donald Trump was finally defeated by the forces of democracy and justice and health was restored.
Well, I agree with you on trump but I feel like the people who have to live with the economic reality of all the mom and pop stores never reopening in favor of big international companies wont be very happy with us
At what point AREN'T you contributing to the deaths if at the very least you can't even wear a piece of cloth over your face?
The places with the strictest mask orders are having surges in cases just the same. E.g. California hospitalizations per capita are now far outpacing Florida. Masks work, kind of, I’m sure, under very particular conditions. But the net effect seems to be minimal.
My understanding was that because this virus can spread presymptomatically or even asymptomatically, there is little or no evolutionary pressure for it to become less deadly. It can easily spread to many people before the host even knows that they have it. Maybe I'm misunderstanding things, but if that is the case then it would seem that the normal "rules" for the virus becoming less deadly over time don't really apply.
There's also no evolutionary incentive for it to be more deadly either. From the perspective of the virus, it has no incentive to kill its host -- if anything, it would want to keep them alive (and functioning) for as long as possible.
You're right for the short term but (in the hypothetical case it becomes deadlier) once we are aware it has becomes deadlier, our behaviour will change and reduce transmission.
Is there any data yet on the exact change in deadliness?
The virus is already not deadly enough to kill itself as about 1/2 of the hosts have no symptoms.
There's so many questions that this raises.
- Is it more infectious or just bypasses current immunities?
- Will the vaccines basically be voided by this?
- Is it less lethal? Could it create more general immunity in communities without killing?
- Has is spread yet? I've read the UK gov knew about this in october... seems like it's probably everywhere by now
It seems the answer is that we don't know if it's spread yet. To quote the ECDC's briefing, "However, most EU/EEA countries sequence much smaller proportions of virus isolates than the UK, so ongoing circulation of this variant outside of the UK cannot be excluded". https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/sites/default/files/documents/SAR...
Basically, the UK is just better set up to detect variants like this than a lot of other countries. The other possibility is that even if this variant hasn't spread yet, there are other variants out there with similar properties that just haven't been detected due to the lack of widespread RNA sequencing. South Africa apparently has one that's similar but unrelated.
https://twitter.com/The_Soup_Dragon/status/13403496399466291...
If this chart is true EU countries announcing the closing borders the last couple of days is waaay to late to prevent the spread of the new strain in Europe.
Yeah, all the evidence seems to point to the border closures being a stupid, counterproductive attempt to close the stable doors after the horse has bolted and maybe shoot the messenger in the process. Unfortunately, there seems to be a bit of a push here in the UK to spin this as a necessary and inevitable measure that the government should have anticipated, including the closure of the border to road freight - which I think is a siginificant escalation compared to the previous EU border closures - for, basically, Brexit-related partistan political reasons.
I think it may be too late, but if it isn’t, bordering of a population where it is more widespread will help. Even if it is too late to prevent this variant from leaving Britain, it will lower the speed at which it spreads, giving time to prepare (assuming it is more widespread in Britain than elsewhere)
Because of that, I think this move may be overcautious, but I don’t see how it can be stupid or counterproductive.
It makes sense to stop further introduction.
Being a little more cynical, the strain probably started somewhere else in Europe and came across the border.
It's probably not a coincidence that this strain was first detected as spreading right next to the Dover crossing.
No answers on most of those Qs, but the messaging on (2) "Will the vaccines basically be voided by this?" is that no, vaccines should still be effective.
I'm not sure how they can no that without restarting extensive trials, but as a sibling commenter points out, viruses mutate constantly so I guess dealing with variants is pretty common when it comes to vaccination.
My understanding is as long as the variant has the same spike protein, vaccines "should" remain effective. So while trials haven't been done yet to verfiy the vaccines are still effective, I'm assuming the spike protein has been observed to be the same so there's no reason to suggest vaccines wouldn't be effective.
EDIT: Actually, sounds like a couple of the mutations are in the spike protein and there is some evidence of reduced antibody effectiveness against the mutated version.
N501Y is properly neutralized by vaccination (there's a paper in Science with these data, but I don't have a link handy right now).
The deletion seems to reduce antibody neutralization, but:
- In the preprint where this was shown, only 4 convalescent sera were tested;
- The same 4 sera had large variation in neutralization activity per se;
- There is no investigation on potential impaired T cell reactivity (cellular immunity): FTR, the "mink mutation", although it exhibited slightly lower antibody neutralization, did not change the reaction of T cells to it.
I realized I made a mistake here but can't correct now: the sera used were 5, not 4.
This is being studied.
Safety is the hardest part of trials, and also the vaccines that were approved are in Phase 4 (post market surveillence).
> Will the vaccines basically be voided by this?
It has been around since September - if vaccines were voided it would have shown up in trials. It seems the human immune system is pretty smart and manufactures many different antibodies against many different sites on the spike protein. So even if some parts of the spike protein mutate, you still have antibodies that will do the job.
- Is it less lethal? Could it create more general immunity in communities without killing?
It might be - it carries one mutation (a deletion) on a part of the genome that helps it evade the host immune system - but more data is needed. If it was less lethal that is a mechanism that can help it spread - people are asymptomatic for longer, or feel better so are out and about instead of in their bed. But although I have seen rumours on this there's nothing definite and no data.
- Has is spread yet? I've read the UK gov knew about this in october...
It has been detected in Denmark as well. The UK - especially obviously London where it is prevalent - is highly globally connected. This variant will be everywhere in the world now in small amounts and if it does spread better it is just a matter of time. The UK does a LOT of genome sequencing compares to most countries so it is well equipped to detect the emergence of new strains and their spread.
> It has been around since September - if vaccines were voided it would have shown up in trials.
The variant didn't reach a significant proportion of infections until November. Evaluation of the efficacy of the Pfizer vaccine was done in July and August. We don't have data to understand how effective the Pfizer vaccine is against this variant yet.
This should be the official position when communicating this information. There simply is not enough data at this point.
I was really shocked to read German Minister statements saying the vacine is still effective for this variant. Sure theoretical the spike is majority unchanged but there is no evidence or data for a government official to make such an absolute statement.
The official message from the UK government when they announced concern about this new strain was "we have no evidence to suggest that the Pfizer vaccine is not just as effective against this new strain". Somehow that gets twisted by some people into "we believe the vaccine is just as effective against this new strain". I think it's party due to not wanting to appear to be doomsaying but also very misleading in terms of communicating the facts.
Notice the word choice: “we have no evidence...” the answer is actually “we don’t know” because we haven’t studied it. There’s a term for this type of communication as it’s quite common but the name escapes me..
My criticism was of Jens Spahn, Germany's Health minister. Claiming there was no evidence that the vacine would not be effective. [0] Which although true sounds incredibly misleading taking into the account the data we currently don't have.
[0] https://metro.co.uk/2020/12/20/covid-vaccines-still-effectiv...
I thought Spahns full statement was reasonable. Deferring to what the health organizations report to him, saying that that "would be very good news" (would be, not is), emphasizing multiple times that this is "as of now, sunday evening". If you hear that and take away "we're definitively safe" ...
(Of course I can't judge the biology and if that actually accurately represented the expert opinion behind it, but to me it communicated clearly enough that this isn't a certain claim, but reflecting a current snapshot of something that's actively looked at)
Voided as a term doesn’t make sense. The vaccine will be less effective for sure, correlated to the distribution of the variant vs. the original strain in the population.
It's not really clear how the vaccine and variant will interact. It can be the case that the vaccine confers strong immunity against the variant or that it doesn't confer any immunity at all, it's not necessarily predictable or linear.
That said, what I've seen immunologists saying is that they expect the vaccine to still work well, because they wouldn't expect months of mutations to add up to the variant escaping the vaccine.
Yes, it's in other countries too eg Australia and Netherlands.
If may have been detected in Australia in returned travellers but it is not in Australia in the community.
Yesterday Australia had 15 community acquired cases (yes, 15 in total, with a further 11 from international travel in hotel quarantine) in the country and a quarter of sydney is in lockdown due to it, the virus variant is an American strain.
Maybe but these variants can arise spontaneously as well, probably as a function of the immune response.
There are a couple of problems with this line of reasoning - yes, as an RNA virus, there is a high rate of mutation. However because of the redundancy of amino acid encoding most mutations will be preservative (ie produce the same protein). Additionally, although there is no reason that chance can’t produce the exact same spike protein mutation in another location in the world, it will be of a different lineage which will clearly show up on sequencing as there will be some clear differences elsewhere (in the preservative mutations). This is highly unlikely to be a result of immune response pressure, in fact I would discount this entirely, mutations arise as a response to copying errors and inside an infection cycle (initial infection, replication, transmission, adaptive immune response).
The final immune response will shut down the virus ability to replicate freely due to recognition; selective pressure to avoid immune response is unlikely due to 1) the continually lowering viral load and 2) the very high number of non-selective antibodies produced that recognise a large number of viral epitopes.
I am now suitably terrified. The vaccine won’t be deployed fast enough. Coronavirus and humanity are in for a roller-coaster ride over the next few years...
There's been a certain amount of public arguments between the government in the UK (yay Christmas) and scientists (boo Christmas). I really hope that this is not a tactical exaggeration used by the latter to get their way that's got way out of hand ...
It seems to me to be possible. I'm undecided either way. Also, isn't it suspicious that anyone who has suggested this is downvoted into oblivion/flagged?
Very suspicious that this story breaks just as Boris needs to lock down the country over christmas.
"everyone is going to hate me, quick think of something to blame.".... Eureka .... "There's a new virus strain, totally unforeseeable, don't blame me for the lock downs"
Just sayin'
These days, it seems like everyone is "Just sayin'" some sort of nonsense conspiracy theory with no evidence. I wish people would stop sayin'.
These days everyone just blindly trusts the people in charge. I wish people would start questioning authority more.
Are you GPT-3?
Why did he need to lockdown the country other than because of this? Given that he said 3 days earlier that this would be tantamount to "cancelling Christmas", and he now looks like a fool and a hypocrite for ridiculing the leader of the opposition over it, what possible benefit does he have to gain?
The strategy in the UK (and much of the world) ignores epidemeology and tries to negotiate with the virus. OK, you say people will die, I'd prefer if they vote for me, how about if we meet in the middle and only a few of them die, but the rest vote for me?
This was probably made worse by politicians because it's their natural instinct, but you'll see regular people trying to bargain like this too. "OK I know it's unsafe to do X, but I really wanted to, and so was extra careful to use hand sanitiser today".
The virus doesn't understand your proposed bargain, it's just (very complicated) chemistry, it is no more able to agree to a "deal" where you can spend Xmas opening presents with the extended family without getting COVID-19 so long as you promise not to stay overnight than a falling rock is able to spare your life because you prayed to Jesus.
One small piece of good news is that to a limited extent, and for some privileged people, technology made it possible to ignore these bad policies and enjoy much of the safety offered by sane policies despite living somewhere that had chosen to ignore them.
Anyway, the idea (which I'm not agreeing with) isn't that Boris knew the old plan (Xmas week doesn't need rules) wouldn't work, and concocted this story to cover for the fact that he'd need to U-turn rather than just never issuing the obviously bad policy, nor that this new strain is the only reason it's out of control and the old policy wouldn't work. Instead the idea is Boris was disappointed to hear that scientists (who've said all along that couldn't work) are right and it's going to drown the NHS in patients, likely resulting in staggering death tolls around New Year - and once he understood that he wanted an excuse to U-turn for which a new strain provides a convenient excuse.
Boris always looks like a fool. It's a big part of how he got elected. British people think he's a charming buffoon. Under current plans he has several years for them to forget he killed their parents or grandparents before they get the chance to kick him out directly, although it's the nature of Tory party politics that Boris isn't likely to survive that long.
"Why did he need to lockdown the country other than because of this?"
Imagine for a moment that the current case number was entirely predictable. i.e. it is due to Boris ignoring scientific advice, believing he knows better. So the need to close for christmas is a result of not locking down sooner and harder. Now due to that failure to sell the hard truth, people wont be able to meet over christmas and he wants to find a way of shifting the blame.
I agree