Any virus is a personal virus if you are brave enough

Learned today that this strain was first seen in September. We didn't have isolation measures for it until 3 months later. It's worldwide, there's really no doubt on it. No point in restricting international travel to slow its spread, the mutation has already propagated.

https://www.foxnews.com/health/coronavirus-cases-in-children-surpass-2-million-mark

12.4% of cases are children.

yeah people cant go to the store in England (exaggeration but whatever) but flights were allowed in and out until just recently. this mutated strain is definitely all over

From what I've seen/read, this strain is more contagious, but has milder symptoms overall. It also has the same protein spike, so current vaccines should be effective against it, as well.

Big disagree. Yes, the British variant is already spread out around the world too much for a total elimination/containment strategy to have any chance of success - this variant will pop up everywhere, and if it's really that much more contagious, it will become the dominant strain eventually. But no, this does not mean that the timing of this process is irrelevant, that slowing the spread of the new variant would be futile. The longer this new variant with its potential for a more explosive growth can be kept to a low share of the overall infection picture in the U.S. (or continental Europe), the better - particularly with spring and with vaccinations on the horizon.

According to the British health task groups, this new strain has an R0 which is about 0.4 points higher than previous strains. If true, this means that much more restrictive countermeasures would be necessary to keep this virus from spiraling totally out of control and completely overwhelming the hospitals. This variation becoming the dominant strain in January versus only becoming dominant in, say, March can easily make a difference of tens of thousands of lives and hundreds of billions in economic damage. Inconveniencing a few travellers with cancelled flights or strict quarantines is a small price to pay in comparison.

International travel restrictions do not do anything to the international spread once you already have community spread. If you've got a dozen cases in your country already, you're already done. You've lost. It's going to spread at a similar rate to the already present Covid strains with increased veracity independent of international travel.

This is why nobody gave Trump credit for the March travel bans BTW. We already had community spread in the U.S., meaning international flights are now irrelevant to the equation and the game is 100% about domestic control measures.

We dont know how widespread the London variant is in places like the US or continental Europe, how common community spread of this new variant actually is. Almost all cases I've read about over the past few days involved persons who recently entered from the UK.

I dont know the exact numbers of travel, but let's say there are 5k travellers from the UK landing in the US every day. Sure, if there are already 400k cases of the British variant in the country, curbing the influx of more of it from international travellers will not do much. But we dont know if it's already that widespread. If there are only 10k domestic cases, then allowing 5k travellers from a region where the more dangerous variant is much more prevalent to enter the country unchecked would definitely make things noticeably worse and speed up the timeline until the new strain is dominant.


If the whole forest is already on fire, throwing in a handful of extra gas cans wont change much. But if there's only a small fire source so far, it's very important to refrain from pouring extra gasoline into it. When it comes to this new virus mutation, we simply do not know yet which of the two scenarios is closer to the true situation on the ground.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Dec 30 2020 01:40pm

I doubt there's "only a small fire". We haven't been sequencing every positive case of Covid, and if it really is spreading faster than previous strains it's almost certain that it's already spread.

Also, if you have 10k cases and you add another 5k, that doesn't actually change much. Exponential spread dosn't care much about doubling or halving the starting conditions. Remember that even if you start from 1/10th the initial value that's only about 3 doubling times, and that doubling time is only a few days. So by increasing it 50% you're only moving the timeline up like 36 hours.

xistenz

I mean really the question is what are you going to do, genotype every covid case? Money isn’t infinite. How do you even properly isolate it to determine how community spread it is - similar to the March problem except a lot more difficult to genotype everyone vs just test everyone and we couldn’t even do the latter

This post was edited by Bazi on Dec 30 2020 02:30pm