Concerning they knew about this in September and October but only released the info Monday via Matt Hancock.
Honestly this government man.
Honestly this government man.
SARS CoV-2 coronavirus / Covid-19 (No tin foil hat silliness please)
- Thread starter Don't Kill Bill
- Start date
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In the latest episode of the United Hour Podcast, Nik (@Rood) is joined by CEO Duncan Drasdo and Financial Director Andy Green from the Manchester United Supporters Trust for a special episode on all things behind the scenes at Old Trafford including a brief history of MUST and their aims today, views on INEOS and Sir Jim Ratcliffe so far, and the Old Trafford regeneration.
Quick question.
Is this mutation or new strain of the corona virus only in the UK or is it or similar variants seen elsewhere.
That is what we are being told and they say that it is 70% more infectious.
Borders between the UK and Belgium/Netherlands will be closed for at least 24 hours.
And the reluctance to put London into tier 3 for economic reasons despite clear evidence the transmission rate was faster than regions in tier 3. The fact they had to switch from tier 2, to tier 3 and then invent tier 4 to put them in within the space of a week speaks to that. I hate this government and wish the north of England could join Scotland and vote leave in indyref2
The people standing round having a chin wag were idiots, no matter when it was. I can sort of understand the chaos at train stations if people only had until midnight to get out.
Don't viruses normally become weaker as they mutate?
Not necessarily. It’s evolution on steroids
You could see the infection rate was rising in London, and falling in greater Manchester, yet they kept London in tier 2, despite it being obvious to everyone apart from the government that was the wrong decision.
I am doing what I want to do. I'll make my own decisions, rather than listening to these absolute idiots in charge.
I am doing what I want to do. I'll make my own decisions, rather than listening to these absolute idiots in charge.
Quite right. There is more than enough information, as opposed to mis-information to make informed decisions.
They are living things. And as a result, the strongest will have the best chance of surviving and therefore replicating.
Yeah, I'm not saying thats acceptable behaviour in these times, just merely the tweets expressing outrage are slightly misguided.
More transmissible versions have occurred a few times, but they haven't necessarily been more transmissible in the ways that I think most people imagine - it's not a "last week it would have taken 2000 virus particles to infect you, this week it only takes 1200" sort of thing. It could be that a mutation increases the asymptomatic but infectious period, or changes the initial symptoms - like losing your appetite, instead of getting a cough.
In other words, people may be spreading the covid virus for longer without realising. Add that to going into winter - closed windows/doors, longer nights and more time indoors - and behaviours (like sitting round a table chatting) that were OK for a while in the summer are suddenly a recipe for disaster.
There are also strains that become dominant through certain super-spreader events/environments. It's thought the Wuhan strain mutated in Europe in January/February into what became a dominant European strain responsible for it racing across Europe. That may have less to do with the mutation than to the fact it spread through ski resorts at high speed, affecting first the apres-ski party places, then the halfterm school holiday visitors and school trips. The summer brought another European strain that seems to have started with camps of summer workers (grape pickers etc) and then moved out through the cities and the resort areas.
In other words, the new strain may look like it's growing fast because of what amount to some superspreader events/activities/environments either reopening or moving indoors. Or their might be some technical advantage (like symptom changes) that strict social distancing (hands, face, space!) can combat but that mislead us into letting our guard down.
Yeah that other strain is the D614G strain that was discussed in the nature article. The UK team that identified this were one of the ones to determine it wasn't a game changer!
Totally agree that we shouldn't jump to any conclusions but I'd say it's fair enough to err on the side of caution here given the available evidence. Aside from where the muttions have occured, the fact there are 17 (?) is unusual:
And the fact one strain is winning out so handily, like in South Africa. There's definitely other possible explanaIn this case the solution works regardless of whether it's the virus behaviour or human behaviour that's the soure of the problem, which makes it easier for the scientists, but I think you can take them on their original premise
That isn't how it works; There have been literally thousands of mutations that aren't worth talking about, and it takes a while to run through tests of each indiviudal one, so it takes a very long time to properly evaluate all of them. It's not when they discovered the mutation but when they discovered the importane of the muttion that matters. They definitely didn't know that months ago. At best they had hypotheses.
It has been found in the Netherlands and a a variant with similar properties has been seen in South Africa, which is also experiencing a sharp rise that almost entirely centres around that one strain too. It's expectdd to be in other countries too. Maybe it is part of the reason Germany's methods are less effective.
Appreciate that.
Would that possibly infer a common source. There are strong links between T Netherlands and South Africa and the UK.?
Do you really believe all of that post?
If people aren't stupid then why do they need to be told to cancel xmas at all? They would use common sense and cancel it themselves.
We dont actually need rules and tiers, the numbers should be coming down with personal fear of catching the feckin virus. My mrs hasn't given her dad a hug for nearly a year because its unwise. Govts aren't to blame for stupidity but maybe for relaxing the rules when numbers were decreasing.
Germany have seen an explosion of death and cases. They've had 700-850 deaths a day and are looking into this more transmissible strain as a reason.
Coronavirus: Neue Variante ist 70 Prozent ansteckender - DER SPIEGEL
People saying this is some UK government covering themselves is a silly kneejerk conspiracy. They don't do this lightly and we're already on a Netherlands banned travel list, it has serious ramifications.
Also there's thousands of strains but mostly are the same in general and it takes time for the cases and data to come in. You have to see it clearly happen to say this strain is more transmissible.
Germany used to be the one reasonably good large European country to have a have a handle on the virus but now they look like any badly performing European country.
Poland is another that's been hit very hard, they've had the equivalent of 1000 a day deaths
Coronavirus: Neue Variante ist 70 Prozent ansteckender - DER SPIEGEL
People saying this is some UK government covering themselves is a silly kneejerk conspiracy. They don't do this lightly and we're already on a Netherlands banned travel list, it has serious ramifications.
Also there's thousands of strains but mostly are the same in general and it takes time for the cases and data to come in. You have to see it clearly happen to say this strain is more transmissible.
Germany used to be the one reasonably good large European country to have a have a handle on the virus but now they look like any badly performing European country.
Poland is another that's been hit very hard, they've had the equivalent of 1000 a day deaths
There's a quick summary of a few things in the BMJ here, and they touch briefly on that point.
I'd read another article that said they very much suspect the Netherlands variant was imported from the UK, with fits up with the notion that it evolved here originally. Hence why they're closing their borders and I wouldn't be surprised to see a lot of borders closed temporarily while we learn more about this. Although we might end up finding out it's in a lot of places already.
It's definitely possible that it went from the UK to South Africa too, but I haven't seen anyone suggesting that's likely. We'll know more once the WHO use some of their resources to do the international comparison, because they already had the strain to look at from Durban (South Africa) late last month I think. Until now I'd guess no-one was looking closely at those two particular mutations so it'd be unlikely to pop out. But it wouldn't be at all unusual for a similar kind of mutation to happen in different parts of the world.
I also think this is true. It's exactly what tories would do: Open all the shops for 3 weeks and encourage everyone to empty their bank accounts, knowing all the while it was highly likely they would then have to cancel the permission in the first place. There is going o be a lot of wasted turkey and food because of Boris idiotic management ... which isn't funny at all either, given the planetary issues we also face.
Hell knows how 4 of us in my home are going to polish off a 6kg turkey and all the other stuff, which I only got because we were planning to have 3 households on xmas and boxing day!
Blows me away that people aren’t stating the simple fact that mutations are only really possible in areas of poor response.
The more a virus is in circulation, the more chances it has to change.
“It’s not our fault, it’s a new strain” should really be expressed as “The new strain is our fault. We let a virus run rampant and it’s now evolved into something worse”.
If Australia saw a new strain develop in the community you could argue bad luck. The math Would be with you.
For the Uk to do it, it’s just another point of condemnation. No sympathy.
The more a virus is in circulation, the more chances it has to change.
“It’s not our fault, it’s a new strain” should really be expressed as “The new strain is our fault. We let a virus run rampant and it’s now evolved into something worse”.
If Australia saw a new strain develop in the community you could argue bad luck. The math Would be with you.
For the Uk to do it, it’s just another point of condemnation. No sympathy.
Nope. 100% scientifically inaccurate. There have been literally thousands of mutations spread out across dozens of countries. We don't blame the flu virus for mutating every year on bad management, we just assess it and adapt to it because it's a biological inevitability.
Here is just one of the strains in Australia, by the way. It is also not bad luck but an inevitability. The type of mutation is just random.
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Getting to the stage that I actually hate this man for his lies, corruption and utter incompetence.
see 3rd tweet: Seems like he is finally under internal party pressure now
see 3rd tweet: Seems like he is finally under internal party pressure now
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Seems like pretty clear instruction.
Yet few will actually blame the populace for its selfishness & stupidity.
Its crystal clear, but I find it impossible to believe they couldn't have predicted the earlier, given the new variant was discovered on 20th September. Opening up London in early December was so crudely cynical.
Hang on. Surely the more chance a virus has to spread the greater the chance of it mutating in a significant way.
I’d love to know if @starkie has changed his opinion now about mixing in pubs with his neighbours for carvery dinners
More transmission means more mutation but it is absolutely not the case that "mutations are only really possible in areas of poor response". That's not a question of interpretation but a question of basic scientific facts. It's mistating the facts to advance an agenda.
Here is an article talking about the mutations at the end of the last month. Here's a quick snapshot just to establisht the very simple point that mutations have happened in areas of strong responses and poor responses.
a Maximum likelihood phylogeny for complete SARS-CoV-2 genomes. Tips are coloured by the continental region of sampling. D614G haplotype status is annotated by the presence/absence coloured columns (positions 241, 3037, 14,408 and 23,403, respectively). b Viral assemblies available from 99 countries displayed on a world map. c Within-continent pairwise genetic distance on a random subsample of 300 assemblies from each continental region. Colours in all three panels represent continents where isolates were collected. Magenta: Africa; Turquoise: Asia; Blue: Europe; Purple: North America; Yellow: Oceania; Dark Orange: South America according to metadata annotations available on GISAID (https://www.gisaid.org) and provided in Supplementary Data 1. The map in Fig. 1b was created using the R package rworldmap using the public domain Natural Earth data set.
There are 1,384 "strains" of the virus in Australia noted in the GISAID. You can download the data by clicking the "1" just above.
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That’s an every day occurrence at my sons school. Totally brazen. The school has practically begged people to mask up after 3 outbreaks in 14 days
It’s not as though the populace wasn’t aware of the dangers of this virus in September. Even a cursory glance online tells one that.
The continual absolving of people causing this virus to continue to spread & kill is childishly embarrassing.
Ah sorry. I didn’t read they were saying that.
One thing that’s not being picked up yet is how hard vaccinating the population in an area is when the cases are so high. Putting aside the obvious logistical challenges of staff sickness I know three people who had their first dose who have now tested positive for COVID in the days afterwards. The current guidance is you can’t have the vaccine within 28 days of a COVID positive test which means their second dose schedule is totally messed up.
What do you mean?
It was herd thinking that left the West defenceless against Covid
As of today, Taiwan’s death toll is 7, compared with almost 70,000 in the UK.
Successful models for tackling the pandemic were in plain sight but we couldn’t bring ourselves to go Asian
Matthew Syed
thetimes.co.uk
It was herd thinking that left the West defenceless against Covid
Matthew Syed
6-8 minutes
Well, who saw that coming, except most of us? New, tighter restrictions have been imposed on London and the southeast, because of a new strain of the virus. The kind of Christmas many had hoped for has effectively been cancelled. What is certain is that the latest about-turn will be pounced on by critics as yet more evidence of a chronically incompetent government.
But it might be worth pausing for a moment and taking a fresh look at this tumultuous year. For when you plot the graphs of daily infections in the period since January, you cannot help being struck by the similarity of outcomes between the UK, Italy, France and, to a lesser extent, Germany. It is as if western countries have been looking at what “peer” nations are doing and then dancing to the same tune.
This was true in March, when the UK felt it could no longer go it alone in allowing the virus to spread after Italy, France and Germany had locked down earlier in the month. It was true in early summer, when one western nation opening up put pressure on others to follow suit. It is also the pattern today, with European nations loosening up for Christmas after America had done so for Thanksgiving — with the UK only belatedly changing course.
The point is that the similarity of the graphs across the G7 subset of western nations has less to do with the properties of the pathogen than the psychology of staying close to the herd. It is easier, politically speaking, to fit in with one’s peers.
But this raises a question that will, I think, baffle future historians. Why did western nations largely follow one another when there were vastly better role models? Taiwan has endured few deaths from Covid, and its economy has barely been affected, growing this year by more than 2.5%. By controlling the virus with precision techniques such as tech-enabled contract tracing, it didn’t need to resort to crude lockdowns or cancel national celebrations. And it didn’t have to turn cancer and other patients away from hospitals, because there was always spare capacity to deal with them.
If nothing else, doesn’t this example show that the “trade-offs” that have dominated debate in the West are largely imaginary? With competent governance, there is no trade-off between lives and livelihoods any more than there is between Covid and non-Covid deaths. By controlling transmission, it is possible to keep the economy open, hospitals open and hospitality open, too. The economy and public health are not in conflict; they are synergistic.
The western debate on civil liberties also seems absurd in this context. I mean, would you rather cede a small amount of personal data to help public health authorities identify super-spreaders, as the Taiwanese have done, enabling you to send your children to school, go to work and live your life, or withhold this data and refuse to wear masks, allowing faster spread of the virus, leading to the mass incarceration known as lockdown?
So why didn’t we put every effort into following the success stories in east Asia? I can’t help wondering if it was not for scientific reasons but cultural ones. When I have raised the east Asian experience since March, a common response has been: they are not like us! They are automata who do what they are told! It could never work here! We are individualists!
This is, at best, misleading. Western populations were highly compliant at the start of the pandemic (albeit with a huge drop-off in the UK after the Barnard Castle incident).
Moreover, it is not as if Taiwan is a collectivist paradise. The nation is a vibrant capitalist democracy of 24 million, with a proud tradition of dissent. As the tech magazine Wired put it: “The democracy activists who risked their lives during the martial law era were not renowned for their willingness to accept government orders or preach Confucian social harmony.”
It is true that pre-existing differences played a role in the varying outcomes. East Asia may have benefited from a slightly different genetic strain of the virus striking particular areas, and citizens may have superior natural resistance. They had also had the “benefit” of Sars, which provided the impetus to make better preparations.
But doesn’t this reinforce the point? If Sars had hit America or France, we would have become infinitely more alert to these blasted pathogens. We would have provided acres of coverage. We would have gained a deeper understanding of exponentiality, rather than mocking Asian nations for “overreacting” to a handful of cases. In other words, the reason we didn’t learn from Asia back then is, I suspect, the same as why we failed to learn now.
Indeed, the more I look at the international comparisons, the more I glimpse the influence of psychology. When you look at the similarity of the waves in western nations, you can’t help seeing herd mentality (perhaps “transnational groupthink” is a better phrase) at work. The rate of deaths per million population in France, Italy, Spain, the UK and America is almost identical. But superimpose east Asian nations and you will see a family of graphs utterly different from the West’s — and almost identical with one another.
This explanation carries even more weight when you look at our historical inability to look beyond our cultural horizons. Isn’t the entire postwar history of the West a succession of misadventures based on a catastrophic ignorance of the places in which we were intervening? Think of Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, to name but three. The academic Amy Chua has described these as “group-blind mistakes of colossal proportions”.
As of today, Taiwan’s death toll is seven, compared with almost 70,000 in the UK. If such a success had occurred in France, there would have been discussion about nothing else. Every meeting in No 10, the Treasury, the Department of Health and Sage would have been about reproducing the success of tech-enhanced tracing, isolating and sophisticated border control. Instead, we have been obsessed with, well, Sweden, the one western nation to have done it a bit differently, but with precious little to teach.
When the full history of Covid is written, other factors will doubtless prove significant in explaining the gulf in outcomes, not least luck. We should also note that western nations led the way on vaccines, thank goodness. But when it comes to containing Covid, it is difficult to resist the conclusion that many of the wealthiest nations failed not because of insufficient capacity but because of narrow horizons. That, at least, is my reading of an otherwise baffling year.
@MatthewSyed
It was herd thinking that left the West defenceless against Covid
Matthew Syed
6-8 minutes
Well, who saw that coming, except most of us? New, tighter restrictions have been imposed on London and the southeast, because of a new strain of the virus. The kind of Christmas many had hoped for has effectively been cancelled. What is certain is that the latest about-turn will be pounced on by critics as yet more evidence of a chronically incompetent government.
But it might be worth pausing for a moment and taking a fresh look at this tumultuous year. For when you plot the graphs of daily infections in the period since January, you cannot help being struck by the similarity of outcomes between the UK, Italy, France and, to a lesser extent, Germany. It is as if western countries have been looking at what “peer” nations are doing and then dancing to the same tune.
This was true in March, when the UK felt it could no longer go it alone in allowing the virus to spread after Italy, France and Germany had locked down earlier in the month. It was true in early summer, when one western nation opening up put pressure on others to follow suit. It is also the pattern today, with European nations loosening up for Christmas after America had done so for Thanksgiving — with the UK only belatedly changing course.
The point is that the similarity of the graphs across the G7 subset of western nations has less to do with the properties of the pathogen than the psychology of staying close to the herd. It is easier, politically speaking, to fit in with one’s peers.
But this raises a question that will, I think, baffle future historians. Why did western nations largely follow one another when there were vastly better role models? Taiwan has endured few deaths from Covid, and its economy has barely been affected, growing this year by more than 2.5%. By controlling the virus with precision techniques such as tech-enabled contract tracing, it didn’t need to resort to crude lockdowns or cancel national celebrations. And it didn’t have to turn cancer and other patients away from hospitals, because there was always spare capacity to deal with them.
If nothing else, doesn’t this example show that the “trade-offs” that have dominated debate in the West are largely imaginary? With competent governance, there is no trade-off between lives and livelihoods any more than there is between Covid and non-Covid deaths. By controlling transmission, it is possible to keep the economy open, hospitals open and hospitality open, too. The economy and public health are not in conflict; they are synergistic.
The western debate on civil liberties also seems absurd in this context. I mean, would you rather cede a small amount of personal data to help public health authorities identify super-spreaders, as the Taiwanese have done, enabling you to send your children to school, go to work and live your life, or withhold this data and refuse to wear masks, allowing faster spread of the virus, leading to the mass incarceration known as lockdown?
So why didn’t we put every effort into following the success stories in east Asia? I can’t help wondering if it was not for scientific reasons but cultural ones. When I have raised the east Asian experience since March, a common response has been: they are not like us! They are automata who do what they are told! It could never work here! We are individualists!
This is, at best, misleading. Western populations were highly compliant at the start of the pandemic (albeit with a huge drop-off in the UK after the Barnard Castle incident).
Moreover, it is not as if Taiwan is a collectivist paradise. The nation is a vibrant capitalist democracy of 24 million, with a proud tradition of dissent. As the tech magazine Wired put it: “The democracy activists who risked their lives during the martial law era were not renowned for their willingness to accept government orders or preach Confucian social harmony.”
It is true that pre-existing differences played a role in the varying outcomes. East Asia may have benefited from a slightly different genetic strain of the virus striking particular areas, and citizens may have superior natural resistance. They had also had the “benefit” of Sars, which provided the impetus to make better preparations.
But doesn’t this reinforce the point? If Sars had hit America or France, we would have become infinitely more alert to these blasted pathogens. We would have provided acres of coverage. We would have gained a deeper understanding of exponentiality, rather than mocking Asian nations for “overreacting” to a handful of cases. In other words, the reason we didn’t learn from Asia back then is, I suspect, the same as why we failed to learn now.
Indeed, the more I look at the international comparisons, the more I glimpse the influence of psychology. When you look at the similarity of the waves in western nations, you can’t help seeing herd mentality (perhaps “transnational groupthink” is a better phrase) at work. The rate of deaths per million population in France, Italy, Spain, the UK and America is almost identical. But superimpose east Asian nations and you will see a family of graphs utterly different from the West’s — and almost identical with one another.
This explanation carries even more weight when you look at our historical inability to look beyond our cultural horizons. Isn’t the entire postwar history of the West a succession of misadventures based on a catastrophic ignorance of the places in which we were intervening? Think of Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, to name but three. The academic Amy Chua has described these as “group-blind mistakes of colossal proportions”.
As of today, Taiwan’s death toll is seven, compared with almost 70,000 in the UK. If such a success had occurred in France, there would have been discussion about nothing else. Every meeting in No 10, the Treasury, the Department of Health and Sage would have been about reproducing the success of tech-enhanced tracing, isolating and sophisticated border control. Instead, we have been obsessed with, well, Sweden, the one western nation to have done it a bit differently, but with precious little to teach.
When the full history of Covid is written, other factors will doubtless prove significant in explaining the gulf in outcomes, not least luck. We should also note that western nations led the way on vaccines, thank goodness. But when it comes to containing Covid, it is difficult to resist the conclusion that many of the wealthiest nations failed not because of insufficient capacity but because of narrow horizons. That, at least, is my reading of an otherwise baffling year.
@MatthewSyed
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If you read this journal on the D614G mutation you'll get a better understanding of why things don't work as quickly as you'd like them to. There has been over 17,000 strains in the UK that were sent for genomic sequencing.
I don't think it's about absolving people, I think it's about the role messaging has in encouraging people to behave correctly. We've had months of government ministers talking as if the problems of Manchester and other northern towns were somehow because Andy Burnham was talking too much.
It's telling that in December we've seen reports like the ones talking about Kay Burley with a table of her friends at a restaurant in London, and Matt Hancock doing the same (though doubtless his mates and his business contacts are the same people - so he probably expensed that one). That was happening in Tier 2 - no indoor household mixing - London. And happened despite Hancock knowing that London should be in Tier 3 - no restaurants at all.
Gambling and over-optimism at the top, blame placing in the public statements, complacency as the end product. If Burley and Hancock thought it was a good time to have a meal with their mates, they were just behaving like their friends/family and lots of other people swam along with it.
Finally some travel bans coming into play. The half arsed nature of how the West has handled this whole thing is a shambles. Will be seen as such a huge failure in the future.
interesting read. Thanks for sharing