1748

Why wouldn’t you think it’s that bad? People have just spent two weeks breaking most of recommendations to limit the spread of Covid-19, at a time when the situation was already bad to begin with. The next 2-3 weeks in Europe are going to be extremely grim.

1749

I made a poor choice of words perhaps. I do think it is very bad/very worrying. I’m just (futilely) hoping that it won’t be as bad as the data is showing.

1750

The next 2-3 weeks are going to be downright peachy on the continent, compared to what comes after that. (The next 2-3 weeks will be very bad in UK and Ireland, no question about that. But for most of the continent, the numbers will probably be looking positive for a short while, before B.1.1.7 reaches a critical mass.)

1751

The next few weeks here will be a clusterfuck of epic proportions. They’re talking about splitting the Moderna vaccine into four shots. To allow more people to get one.

The fuck? There are millions of vials of vaccine sitting in freezers. They just are not being administered fast enough.

So again, I say, WHAT THE FUCK?

1752

“We made a thing, here is how you use it.”
“Thanks, let’s use it in a completely different way, a way that could fucking make it not work.”

1753

Schools are already mostly closed across London (except key worker children and secondary children in an exams year). I think you are going to see the rest of the country not yet in tier 4 move to that tier (effectively nearly a lockdown), though 78% of the population already is, and schools outside London close soon too. My wife being one of the lucky ones who gets to commute in London to go teach the children of key workers.

Covid: Regional rules ‘probably going to get tougher’, says Boris Johnson - BBC News

And that will slow things down a bit and be completely compensated by the post Christmas rise. What the next few weeks will look like is indeed a worrying prospect.

So yes, the additional measures to bring us even closer to a national lockdown are pretty likely, IMO. And people here will also likely bear it better than the “mah freedom” American types. But we shall see some non respect of the rules for sure.

1754

It’s like every messed up Project Manager on the planet is somehow involved in the vaccine roll out.

1755

They failed their way up. It’s how the stupid world works.

1756

I can only imagine the smugness of the wealthy and well-connected who can sneak into the poorly-administered line and make sure they get the proper double dose ahead of their phase, just before the nightmare scenarios arrive for the rest of us.

1757

(The makers had already assumed as much.)

1758

The title is really misleading.

This study did not test for neutralization against either of the real B.1.1.7 or B.1.351 variants. Instead it was run on a synthesized virus that had just one specific spike mutation. And that mutation was not even the one that is expected to have the biggest chance of reducing antibody effectiveness.

We can still expect the vaccines to work, but unfortunately this study doesn’t particularly increase our confidence in it.

1759

Any thoughts? I’m not in a position to judge the analysis.

1760

The Brazil-Japan variant right now is the one that has vaccinemakers worried a bit more. That one might have or get some resistance.

1761

UK update.

Life expectancy has been increasing in the UK. In recent years, about 0.9% of the UK population dies. In 2020, 1.03% died (back to 2003 levels).

Or to rephrase, the pandemic has already killed over 0.1% of the UK population.

1762

I read a lot of this new mutation spreading faster than the “old” one. But I could not find an explanation. Sorry if this had posted, but how does the mutation do it? Maybe someone can enlighten me.

1763

Which of the new variants do you mean?

If you mean B.1.1.7 (“the UK one”), AFAIK we don’t know the exact mechanism. There’s theories / experimental data about the effects of some of the specific mutations, but no holistic explanation.

We do know some of the parameters though. It’s not more effective at reinfecting people. It’s not more effective at infecting some specific group of people, but not others (e.g. the early reports about it being particularly good at infecting kids were probably mistaken). It’s not comparatively better at spreading just in some specific circumstance (in contact tracing analysis, it appears to be spreading more effectively than the baseline whether the contact was close or not). But people infected with the variant have much higher viral loads in nasopharyngeal samples (10-100x).

The obvious theory from the above would be that if the viral loads are higher, anyone infected will be shedding more of the virus, and thus anyone exposed to them will have a higher chance of catching it. But even if that obvious explanation holds, it just moves the question to “why does it cause higher viral load”.

If you mean B.1.351 (“the South African one”), I honestly don’t believe it’s yet been established that it does spread faster. It might be, but the evidence was kind of thin to start with, and hasn’t really been solidifying over time.

If you mean something else (the one in Nigeria, or Japan, or Brazil), there’s just a handful of samples of each available and basically no epidemiological data. Way too early to get concerned.

1764

I suspect it’s a case of any new mutation we actually notice is generally going to be one that spreads better, because the mutations that don’t we don’t notice since they didn’t spread (and thus tend to die off).

I am not remotely a epidemiologist, but that’s just my guess based on how evolution tends to work.

1766

Regardless we, the wife and I, wear a cloth mask over another mask. I have a box full of masks. They are good. I hope.

1767
1768

So here in Indonesia, where they are going to use the Sinovac vaccine, there have been messages on social media that people with hypertension would not be allowed to be vaccinated.

I dismissed this as I couldn’t see anything about that anywhere “official”, and frankly I thought that would be pretty big news considering the number of people who have hypertension. Subsequently there was a CNN Indonesia article that kind of suggested the no-vaccination, but wasn’t particularly clear.

Now I have been shown a notice, supposedly from a Jakarta hospital, that appears to say that those with BP >140/90 will not be vaccinated,

Is this a thing anywhere else? My wife has hypertension so we are a bit anxious about that.