Coronavirus

[Benjsh]

It's not a lockdown though. Schools and offices will still open, shops still open and people still mixing everywhere.

If we need another lockdown then fine but make it a proper one. Otherwise all we will be doing is putting people out of work with these fake lockdowns. They don't work as nothing is being locked down. It's a shambles.

It's time Boris resigned. He's not learning

 

[Jonathan]

Question is the same as the welsh lockdown how long for this time?.

Knowing Boris...five minutes?

 

[Mr Pearse]

It's not a lockdown though. Schools and offices will still open, shops still open and people still mixing everywhere.

If we need another lockdown then fine but make it a proper one. Otherwise all we will be doing is putting people out of work with these fake lockdowns. They don't work as nothing is being locked down. It's a shambles.

It's time Boris resigned. He's not learning

Problem with shops is what ever was left open was classed as essential. What one person don’t find essential another person would so we can’t really say everything must close down. Obviously I don’t agree with places like garden centres and places like that opening I don’t honestly think there’s anything urgently essential with them opening.

 

[Thameslink Rail]

Boris won't shut the schools because
1. He wants exams to go ahead
2. The disruption to education has already been very severe and we can't really afford to go any further behind.

 

[Dave]

Anyone in lterested in reading about the changes to the virus, this was published today and makes concerning reading

https://virological.org/t/prelimina...defined-by-a-novel-set-of-spike-mutations/563

in particular, when discussing two of the changes to quote the document:

“ experimental data suggests mutation N501Y can increase ACE2 receptor affinity (Starr et al. 2020) and P681H, one of 4 residues comprising the insertion that creates a furin cleavage site between S1 and S2 in spike. The S1/S2 furin cleavage site of SARS-CoV-2 is not found in closely related coronaviruses and has been shown to promote entry into respiratory epithelial cells and transmission in animal models (Hoffmann, Kleine-Weber, and Pöhlmann 2020; Peacock et al. 2020; Zhu et al. 2020). N501Y has been associated with increased infectivity and virulence in a mouse model (Gu et al. 2020). Both N501Y and P681H have been observed independently but not to our knowledge in combination before now.”

Which suggests that not only could or it Increase infection in the respiratory organs but also possibly increase the virulence (serverity). No wonder the gov are worried about this.

A strain with a similar mutation was picked up earlier in South Africa. Studies suggest not only does it infect younger people but they suffer from a more severe form of Covid even if they have no existing comorbidities.

https://www.ibtimes.sg/scientists-d...th-africa-that-puts-younger-people-risk-54304

I know this is an area of concern for you but just to clarify a point.

There is not yet a study linking severity with that mutation. The news report suggests scientist are investigating a potential link between the two. They will have a lot of statistical confounders to remove before causal links are established. At the moment this same link hasn’t been seen in this country, this strain has been in the UK since September and for its faults the centralised control of the NHS makes this country a great place to investigate such links. I’m not saying it isn’t the case but like in the past you are jumping 4 steps ahead with the conclusions.

The increased infectivity of the other mutations definitely seems to have been established however. Next question is whether the mutations impact vaccination success. I think of great concern is that this virus seems to have a propensity to evolve mutations that work against the immune system, which seems to be a talent it has picked up ironically due to some of the treatments being applied if the conclusions of that study are correct.

 

[Dave]

Boris won't shut the schools because
1. He wants exams to go ahead
2. The disruption to education has already been very severe and we can't really afford to go any further behind.

He won’t shut the schools because he made a stubborn and ill advised commitment and doesn’t want to u-turn on it. He doesn’t give a monkeys about any kid not in Eton. No one thinks the schools should be shut permanently but they could have been creative with the school year to coincide with some of these lockdowns.

 

[Swarm Chris]

Yet again the choice of regions into tiers makes no sense. I'm in a largely rural area, we have 346 cases in the last 7 days, and now in tier 4.

Drive 20 minutes north, another largely rural area, but with a city - 1150 cases in the last 7 days, tier 2.

Edit: the rates per 100,000 are also less than Staffordshire, Rotherham, Lincolnshire, and marginally higher than some neighbouring regions still in tier 2.

 

[Mr Pearse]

Boris won't shut the schools because
1. He wants exams to go ahead
2. The disruption to education has already been very severe and we can't really afford to go any further behind.

Even keeping schools opening will still cause disruption no end. Once one child/teacher tests positive the whole class/year group has to self isolate or that was the case only recently. So obviously year groups having to keep self isolating will always cause disruption.

 

[Thameslink Rail]

Even keeping schools opening will still cause disruption no end. Once one child/teacher tests positive the whole class/year group has to self isolate or that was the case only recently. So obviously year groups having to keep self isolating will always cause disruption.

That most definitely has not been the case in my school, if there is a positive test then only students they sit next to self isolate.

 

[Matt N]

I had a thought; surely even if the very worst case scenario comes to light, and the vaccine doesn’t work against the new strain (which based on what the scientists have been saying, I think is very unlikely), they could just modify it to fit the new strain like they do with the flu jab every year?

For the mRNA jabs especially, I can imagine that it’s not too difficult to modify them to fit a new strain.

 

[Dave]

I had a thought; surely even if the very worst case scenario comes to light, and the vaccine doesn’t work against the new strain (which based on what the scientists have been saying, I think is very unlikely), they could just modify it to fit the new strain like they do with the flu jab every year?

For the mRNA jabs especially, I can imagine that it’s not too difficult to modify them to fit a new strain.

Yes but it makes vaccination more complicated. This virus isn’t mutating particularly fast, and Flu has a few other tricks that allow it to mutate very fast and spread the successful strains much quicker. This is why the Flu vaccination can sometimes be only 50% effective. But the Covid vaccination will be less effective if we have to keep revising and readministering it.

 

[delta79]

There is muttering that oxford vaccine is based on the flu vaccine and can be changed like the seasonal flu vaccine.
I am hoping the validation and clearance for use has seasonal variation linked to it.

I really do hope T cell memory is still effective on this new variant.

Sent from my SM-A217F using Tapatalk

 

[Matt N]

It’s said that our current coronavirus tests still pick up the new variant, so I wouldn’t think that it’s so drastically different from the previous variant that it would have a major effect on things like immunity and vaccines.

Besides; after doing a little further research, it turns out that this strain has been in Britain since September. If it was considerably worse than the previous strain, surely we’d have seen the effects of that quite a while ago?

 

[Islander]

Yes but it makes vaccination more complicated. This virus isn’t mutating particularly fast, and Flu has a few other tricks that allow it to mutate very fast and spread the successful strains much quicker. This is why the Flu vaccination can sometimes be only 50% effective. But the Covid vaccination will be less effective if we have to keep revising and readministering it.

So is the success rates of the Covid vaccine being 70-90% dependant on the virus thus far mutating quite slowly? As in, is the main reason for the difference in efficacy between flu vaccines and Covid vaccines the difference in rate of mutation?

(Can I also just add how awesome it is that TST has a resident virologist and vaccine expert? I know technically you're neither - a radiologist IIRC? - but you definitely tick the boxes for me Dave...)

 

[Dave]

So is the success rates of the Covid vaccine being 70-90% dependant on the virus thus far mutating quite slowly? As in, is the main reason for the difference in efficacy between flu vaccines and Covid vaccines the difference in rate of mutation?

(Can I also just add how awesome it is that TST has a resident virologist and vaccine expert? I know technically you're neither - a radiologist IIRC? - but you definitely tick the boxes for me Dave...)

Vaccination is a complicated topic, it isn’t my area of expertise (waves at the wonderful world of diagnostics) but I know how to read medical research as it was a part of my degree and masters. News outlets don’t do a very good job unfortunately.

Virus’s that mutate fast don’t do well with vaccination at all, this is why flu is so hard to vaccinate against. If you mutate the spike protein enough for the antibodies to not be able to bind with them then your immune response at that stage fails and the body has to start again with working on a new antibody. If it wasn’t such a major health impact virus you wouldn’t bother at all with the flu vaccine because of the sheer effort, because it massively impacts health systems there is a desire to keep re-vaccinating based on the new strains.

The issue with corona virus’s and vaccines is we have never really tried to vaccinate before. Other than 2 very short lived epidemics no corona virus has had the health impact this has. So we really are in the dark on how well the body will maintain an immune memory from the vaccine and how many mutations it will take to cause the vaccine response to become less effective. But Covid is not mutating at an unusual rate for the type of virus it is.... yet

 

[BigT]

Coronavirus’s mutate all of the time and generally as they become more infectious they become weaker.
I still think a lot of this talk of mutations is a smoke screen for the fact London was put in the wrong tier to start with, that’s what has caused the outbreak down there more than anything else.

Going back to talk of a lockdown in January how will that help exactly? The main outbreak area is now in a lockdown anyway and most areas north of this are actually seeing cases go down except for small pocket outbreaks.
You can’t lump a whole country together on this or you will end up with skewed figures, this is an excellent link to explain that situation, drill right in and you can see the small pockets skewing the figures.

https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/interactive-map

 

[Dave]

Coronavirus’s mutate all of the time and generally as they become more infectious they become weaker.
I still think a lot of this talk of mutations is a smoke screen for the fact London was put in the wrong tier to start with, that’s what has caused the outbreak down there more than anything else.

Going back to talk of a lockdown in January how will that help exactly? The main outbreak area is now in a lockdown anyway and most areas north of this are actually seeing cases go down except for small pocket outbreaks.
You can’t lump a whole country together on this or you will end up with skewed figures, this is an excellent link to explain that situation, drill right in and you can see the small pockets skewing the figures.

https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/interactive-map

I think the mutations announcement on Friday was definitely a smokescreen for the governments mishandling of the situation. That said the overall impact of the mutation is still a worry and although over time the consensus is that infectivity will increase and severity decrease the two don’t have to happen simultaneously, so you could have a period of increased infectivity with the same or even increases severity.

 

[BigT]

One thing I did read on Friday though that hasn’t been widely reported, although hospital numbers are over 90% in some areas they are still lower than this time last year.

 

[Dave]

One thing I did read on Friday though that hasn’t been widely reported, although hospital numbers are over 90% in some areas they are still lower than this time last year.

Thats because elective cases are stopping. The issue is ITU beds. If you have no ITU beds a large number of surgeries can’t occur, if they don’t occur then the patients that traditionally would flow down from ITU to normal beds isn’t happening and patients having other elective treatment are not taking beds then you have lower overall numbers but a big problem.

We also have fewer beds due to the complexity of distancing and splitting hot and cold areas

 

[BigT]

Thats because elective cases are stopping. The issue is ITU beds. If you have no ITU beds a large number of surgeries can’t occur, if they don’t occur then the patients that traditionally would flow down from ITU to normal beds isn’t happening and patients having other elective treatment are not taking beds then you have lower overall numbers but a big problem.

We also have fewer beds due to the complexity of distancing and splitting hot and cold areas

The pubs being shut also helps I guess.