Current Affairs Coronavirus Thread - Serious stuff !!!

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Cool_Blue said:
Doctor phoned me this morning, I’m booked in for next Wednesday :)
Should I refuse to have it if it’s the AZ?
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Excellent. Good old British gnats piss mate, getting mine Saturday. I’ll be refusing that German gnatzi piss if it’s offered though as I’ve heard the goose step does your hamstring no good at all. You should definitely have the Chateau Lafite AstraZenica......
 
peteblue said:
Excellent. Good old British gnats piss mate, getting mine Saturday. I’ll be refusing that German gnatzi piss if it’s offered though as I’ve heard the goose step does your hamstring no good at all. You should definitely have the Chateau Lafite AstraZenica......
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You sell gnats piss when you're not giving it away.
 
Tubey said:
First sentence is false, or at best misleading - there's no evidence any variant reduces the effectiveness of any vaccine in preventing serious illness or death.

And that's the key. "Dangerous mutations" are only dangerous if that immunogenic response is evaded. All evidence suggests it won't be, because coronavirus is gonna coronavirus; it'll change the delivery mechanism, it'll change transmissability, but it's still, ultimately, COVID-19.

You can't shut a country down permanent on a vanishingly thin probability that COVID-19 morphs into something worse, and indeed when deaths/ICU admission are reduced we'll be tracking infections and variants through T&T passively anyway.

The "running battle" you speak of only occurs if we're in the midst of a pandemic that is causing serious illness and death; if it isn't, it's not a battle. We don't wage war on the common cold because there's an understanding that the cost of doing so isn't worth it. And that's where I think you and others in this thread have got it wrong; you have the view that we need to absolutely batter COVID into submission through community action, eradicate it, just in case it mutates into a boogie man virus that will get us again. We don't.

Also, you don't need to suppress a virus for a vaccine to be effective - it doesn't need a 'best shot'; it's either effective or it isn't. Unless I've misread it, the last sentence makes no sense.
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You may have seen when I post that I am not a big fan of the negativity being pushed by the press but that is not to say that anyone should ignore the results that are coming out.

It is all well and good to repeat ‘immunogenicity/immune response’ but to then ignore the threat posed by ‘escape mutations’ i.e. “the ability of a microorganism to defend itself from host immune responses by making mutations in its genotype and phenotype” seems a tad naïve or ill-informed.

Viral vaccine resistance is rare but does happen as with influenza. The findings from current studies is not definitive and the studies are ongoing but we do need to err on the side of caution

Current discussions from virologists and immunologists point to the fact that they do not know what conditions will prompt an escape mutation but the fear is that reduced antibody levels might provide the required environment for escape mutations to emerge

We are all now experts on the efficacy of vaccines and the like but even GOTs experts might recognise that If someone were to become infected during the extended spacing between jabs, for example, the sub optimal immune response could allow mutant version of Covid to emerge and evade the person’s immune response. That is a hypothetical position but the bigger worry is that the virus is currently adapting outside of vaccine forced immune responses, most likely adapting to immunity from previous infection as with the Brazil and South African variants.

Imperial College London have just completed a series of tests and modelling that suggests that three quarters of the population of Manaus have already been infected with Covid which should have created herd immunity. Despite this a new wave of a mutated variant has the hospitals at breaking point once again as has been on the news, link below.

https://www.reuters.com/news/picture/brazils-hospitals-pushed-to-breaking-poi-idUSRTR4Z5CU

Because the previous infection, was not preventing reinfection Imperial with Oxford shifted their studies to look at mutations in the virus and found the P1 mutation. The study is ongoing but they have discovered that the P.1 mutation escapes immune response generated by the variant that ran wild in 2020. Part of the study is presented in the link below.

https://virological.org/t/genomic-c...-2-lineage-in-manaus-preliminary-findings/586

When those involved in the studies are concerned it would be folly to simply dismiss their concerns.
“Some of the data I’ve seen in the last 48 hours have really scared me,” says Daniel Altmann, an immunologist at Imperial College London, who worries that some of results could portend a reduction in the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines.
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The G2P-UK National Virology Consortium Head, Wendy Barclay, “The sequences that are in the spike protein there, are in the spike protein receptor domain. Studies from other groups and our own are suggesting that they might impact the way that some people’s antibodies can see the virus. It’s important that we carry out this work now and carry it out carefully and in several different laboratories to really firm up those results, because they have big implications.”
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“So far, the virus does not appear to have become resistant to COVID-19 vaccines,” says vaccinologist Philip Krause, who chairs a WHO working group on COVID-19 vaccines. “The not-so-good news is that the rapid evolution of these variants suggests that if it is possible for the virus to evolve into a vaccine-resistant phenotype, this may happen sooner than we like,”
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Possibly a more accessible discussion related discussion in this CNN piece.

https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/12/health/coronavirus-mutation-south-africa-variant/index.html

It’s not all doom and gloom but this is far from over. In my opinion, if the virus is not treated with respect it might just slap us in the face. The vaccine programme is a big positive but we really do need a proper track trace and suppress system in place to hinder the chances of escape mutations. This might also mean that we possibly have to accept limited international travel to give the vaccine its best chance of success.
 
Hospital figures - 489 deaths were announced today, down 86 on yesterday and down 156 on last Friday. 407 deaths were in English hospitals, down 87 on yesterday and down 130 on last week. The 7 day rolling average falls to 554.86

All settings - for the 28 day cut off, 758 deaths were announced today, up 80 on yesterday and down 256 on last Friday. The 7 day rolling average falls to 717.57

For the 60 day cut off, 978 deaths were announced today, up 162 on yesterday and down 198 on last Friday. The 7 day rolling average falls to an even 865
 
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