I live in London. The core issue here is that the government hasn't really taken any action. There are "rules" but they are full of loopholes and totally unenforced.
2 cases in particular stand out to me:
Compliance with mask wearing on TFL is less than 50%. "Covid enforcement" officers walk around about one train in 50, and despite it being 8 months since this started, "I don't have one" is an acceptable answer to why you're not wearing a mask.
Supermarkets continue to be rammed, but staff aren't required to wear masks. Nor are they enforcing the requirement on customers beyond the door. One staff member with covid will rapidly infect a few 1000 people given how busy they are on a Saturday morning. Wtf aren't staff required to wear masks?
The attitude here is rapidly becoming "why should I bother if no one else is?". And frankly, I think the government know and encourage this. Its all but policy. Time and again we see them decline scientific advice, then act surprised when infection rates spike.
I'm especially frustrated as my best friend lives in Melbourne. Despite lockdown starting at basically the same time, and some crazy bad luck/incidents, Melbourne is back to BAU.
Also in London and 100% agree. I’ve barely been to a shop in 8 months because of this.
For some reason we can manage to prevent drunk agro people entering a club with the wrong shoes, but 8 months into a pandemic we can’t make people wear a bloody mask? It’s insane.
The government are partly to blame for making rules so haphazardly that even someone like me who reads EVERYTHING and wants to do the right thing 100% of the time finds them hard to be sure of.
But ultimately people have to start taking the blame for not even doing the basics or following the letter of the law but not the spirit - nose slingers are the prime example of this.
I’ve just decided to go my own much more stringent path and ignore dumb government advice.
I've heard how to wear an aircraft oxygen mask a hundred times in my life but never a PSA on how to wear a COVID mask. One I hope never to do and the other I do every week at least.
Wow. Here in deepest Republican middle America mask wearing by _staff_ in supermarkets is universal. Customers around 90% if you count "nose-slingers" as non compliant. Pretty much nobody just swanning around with no mask these days. Costco has heavy mask enforcement -- they will hunt down and eject anyone with their nose out.
Where masks are not worn here is in smaller family owned businesses. Some have notices requiring masks on the door, some (many) do not, even though it's a state mandate.
Since this is the US, we have no public transport so I can't comment on that.
Here in the liberal northwest, where we at least have a token amount of public transport, I see the bus signs alternating between their usual route number + description and "masks required". Haven't been on one to verify use by ridership, or to see what the driver's reaction to noncompliant riders is. The higher staff-to-rider ratio might help?
Outdoor mask use is limited (50%?) but at least quite sparse and distant (it's pretty cold, and wet, and everyone drives anyways.) Indoors the numbers are much higher (I'm guessing at least 90%), including for smaller businesses. I'm trying to think of a single business around here (small or large) without at least a sign saying you need to mask up before entry, and I'm drawing a blank. Several have soap dispensers too, and haphazard plexiglass sheets to help physically separate staff from customers.
Food is strictly delivery and take-out. Even when dine-in was still AFAIK legal, some places had it already voluntarilly closed off anyways.
> Haven't been on one to verify use by ridership, or to see what the driver's reaction to noncompliant riders is.
Compliance is very high (>95%?), but the people who do not comply are basically the same people who were problems in the Before Times: belligerent, mentally ill, or both. The drivers almost always let them get away with it, again just as in the Before Times, probably because it's a risk to even interact with these people. I, for one, try very hard not to make eye contact with them or even look in their general direction; treating them like the Bugblatter Beast of Traal is at least moderately effective.
I do wish they wouldn't flash the stupid "Masks Required" on the route signs so often, though. It makes it a lot harder to tell which bus is actually arriving. And showing it on the route indicator on the _back_ of the coach is just spiteful.
> Simple hygiene measures, such as hand washing and staying home when sick should be practiced by everyone to reduce the herd immunity threshold.
Wearing a mask seems like a simple hygine measure to me.
Perhaps a signator might not wear a mask as a measure of protest against government "overreach", disregarding that part of the declaration, disregarding the law, and disregarding the risk of their actions to the health of their fellow citizens.
That last bit seems rather hostile. Rather belligerent. So I think we're right back to square one.
There are reasonable discussions and lawsuits to be had about how far is too far, and what reasonable public policy looks like. Even arguing on the internet sounds more productive to me than not wearing a mask as "protest" though.
Im in Scotland, at my local coop the staff hardly ever wear masks. Twice ive seen them have conversations with people just hanging at the till who arent wearing masks eithet.
Not sure about other retailers, but the one I work for (300+ stores and still expanding) doesn't really allow us to enforce such mask mandates. Sure, we have a sign posted that says you need a mask, but it's an understood no-no to push any further than asking if they want one for fear of customer complaints to corporate. Because even when the customer is wrong, they're still "right" (which is utter garbage).
I got chided at Costco for bringing in my five year old without a mask (she’d broken the straps on the ride there), even though the state mandate here is for ages above five. Costco employee said nope, in here anyone two and over needs a mask. So I had to impromptu tie up an adult mask’s ear straps to accommodate her, and go in with a lot of crying on her part because my first try was too tight.
Yup, same. I live in Idaho, and you’ve got to be out in the boonies before mask compliance for the customer base falls below 50%. I’ve not seen a single staff member not wearing a mask so far. But I’ve also avoided stores that culturally would be anti-mask, to be fair. I’d probably have a different take if I’d visited say, a gun store.
For gun stores, auto repair shops and the like, I adopt the approach that supposedly it takes 15 minutes of close exposure to become infected (obviously probabilistically), so if I absolutely must visit one of those places I aim to be in and out in less than 10 minutes.
I was on a flight from Abu Dhabi to Frankfurt last month. The moron in the next counter traveling to Paris literally told the check-in counter employees that he had Covid and asked whether he could travel.
I don't know, I'd like to call this Angevin idiocy or something. But yeah, Europe does have its fair share of covidiots too.
Public transport doesn't really exist in the US, outside of major cities. In non-urban areas, if there's a bus at all, it'll be like one token bus route that takes a roundabout path to nowhere in particular and comes once every 3 hours.
Yes, we have some bus services (Greyhound, like in the movies, and a bus that goes between towns once a day) but I've never been on one and don't know anyone who has. Kids begin driving age 16 and under that age are typically driven places by a friend or parent, so there's not much need for busses.
Also: younger kids are ferried back and forth to school in special yellow busses that are only used for school service. So actually there _is_ a widespread public transport service all over the US but people don't think of it as such because it's run by the schools and only usable by school kids. Some companies run their own busses too for their workers, to and from the plant, to suit shift hours.
A decent amount of it is unintentional I suspect. Subconcious fiddling, poor feeling / awareness of slipping masks... a gentle reminder that "your mask has slipped a bit" can do wonders.
Seen a guy on the street taking off mask to do giant sneeze, put it back on afterwards promptly. His wife facepalmed. To his defence he’d probably have to wear juicy mask if he didn’t do it.
My interpretation is that this is referring to those individuals who are wearing a surgical type mask, with the top of the mask resting on their upper lip and their nose not covered by the mask.
Yes. I get the impression that often they simply don't know how to put these masks on -- you need to pull them apart somewhat so they extend from the nose bridge to the chin. If you don't know that's how they're fitted, you'll end up with either of the nose or bottom of the mouth uncovered.
That's actually nonsense for the UK, as the real figure is 280,000 which includes people in temporary accommodation, which is provided by the government.
In the UK if someone is on the street and needs a place to stay there are shelters in every town. Nationally there are about 4,000 people that sleep rough, although most of the people that do suffer from addiction or mental illness. Many choose not to go to shelters because you have to be sober to stay in them.
To use a local(ish) example to me, Multnomah County in Oregon has about 815K people, and 3800 that are either living on the streets, in a shelter, or in temporary housing. That's 0.4%. Portland is known for having a homeless problem.
It surprises people to hear this, but mask compliance in the US is better than most of all of Europe. People still get the virus though, because it’s almost never spread through community but rather face-to-face unmasked indoor contact, which is something people will never give up.
> Compliance with mask wearing on TFL is less than 50%
where? my counter-anecdote is I've taken to counting everyone on the carriage I'm on (between zone 2 and 1), and it's never more than 2-3 people without a mask, something like 90-95% compliance (seems down from a few months ago, though). in supermarkets it seems higher than that, to the extent I was quite weirded out to see a single person not wearing a mask last week.
TFL Rail, the Eastern half, Romford, Chadwell Heath etc. To be fair, it got better on the central line. This was mid day not commuter rush. I do think East London is pretty poor at compliance culturally...
This is my observation too. Compliance varies across different parts of London. I was quite surprised to be the only person wearing a mask in a busy Tesco Local in East London several weeks after they were first mandated. In comparison, in far South East London it's unusual to see someone without a mask shopping.
The train i catch in SE London is travelling from tier 3 (Kent) to tier 2 (tiers as of the last few weeks). Despite travel out of a tier 3 are being 'advised against', the train is busy, 1/3 of people not wearing a mask, 1/3 not wearing it correctly, all the windows closed because it's 'cold'.
It depends a lot on what time you take the train IME. At 8am it's nearly 100%, on a Friday evening it's closer to 20%.
And of course on the rare occasion a staff member challenges someone not wearing a mask, they claim they're exempt and don't have to provide any proof.
very serious, during the day and evening, between zone 1 and eastern zone 2, I see extremely high compliance. it appears to vary enormously by area, which is very surprising to me.
Also a Londoner. Whilst I've observed greater mask compliance, shops, cafes, bars and restaurants have been packed. I've been to bars freely serving alcohol with no need to buy food, just like the old days. Definitely seeing rule breaking.
And I've had a friend who wanted to beat the travel restrictions by leaving London before midnight. That's rule beating.
I see it everywhere.
A PSA because it's important: I can promise future you would rather remember "dang, do you remember that shit Christmas we had to stay home?" over "dang, do you remember that shit Christmas that someone accidentally gave Mum covid and she died because we REALLY wanted Christmas with the family in the middle of a pandemic". It really isn't worth it. Not right now. Just be patient and wait.
I’m genuinely quite shocked that bars are still serving alcohol at all. A quick glance at a typical bar bathroom should tell you everything you need to know about how safety conscious everyone is going to be after they’ve had 3 drinks.
Some of you will still get Long Covid, which may leave you with permanent breathing issues and other health problems.
The biggest lie is that if you're under 30 you're immune. You're not - not even slightly. You're far less likely to die than someone who is 85 and obese with diabetes and high blood pressure. But no one knows what the long term health implications are for younger people who make a partial recovery. And there's been a non-negligible number of those.
Given the rates, though, it basically seems worth the risk if the alternative is to lose a year of say, your 20's. You have to weigh up the expectation costs in quality-adjusted life years, with associated error bars.
I don't have the age breakdown but serious/long Covid is about 15% of cases, which is potentially millions of people in most countries if we let the epidemic rip through.
Symptoms include mental fog, loss of concentration, extreme fatigue, loss of smell..
This is why the idea of chasing herd immunity without a vaccine has always been misguided
You seem to be combining “serious” and “long” cases together. We already know that the vast majority of “serious” cases occur in the elderly/sickly, so your statistic of 15% is useless FUD.
Londoner here too and I agree with your observations about compliance. Tons of rule breaking. The dance studio next to my dwelling has been running popular dance classes as recently as last night. I think it's mostly an age thing: the under 20s almost completely ignore covid restrictions, and so does a substantial part of the under 30s. I can't even blame them as it doesn't affect them. And they mostly lack an understanding of the concept of asymptomatic carrier.
Regarding your PSA: In the mean time Taiwan has not had a quarantine at all, and has been
free of (internal) Covid for over 200 days. Other SE-Asian countries
are all doing very well, Japan for example does not have quarantine either.
European lock-down policies have been a monumental failure. Not good enough to stop the spread. But ruining the economy (and everybody's fun). It is truly remarkable that Europeans agree with being locked away for nearly one year now with little to show for, while other societies achieve much better results with different, and less drastic measures. No curiosity at all, it seems, even to understand why Taiwan, Japan and other countries succeed! SMH
> the under 20s almost completely ignore covid restrictions, and so does a substantial part of the under 30s. I can't even blame them as it doesn't affect them.
I think it's less because the disease doesn't affect them, and more because the restrictions do. If you're living as a family unit then restrictions are tough, but it's something else entirely if you're a single person living alone (or with people you don't like).
Indeed I've seen a similar attitude (although perhaps less actual rule breaking) from at-risk old people saying damn the rules, they'd like to see their relatives.
Londoner here too and I agree with your observations about compliance. Tons of rule breaking. The dance studio next to my dwelling has been running popular dance classes as recently as last night. I think it's mostly an age thing: the under 20s almost completely ignore covid restrictions, and so does a substantial part of the under 30s. I can't even blame them as it doesn't affect them. And they mostly lack an understanding of the concept of asymptomatic carrier.
Regarding your PSA: In the mean time Taiwan has not had a quarantine at all, and has been free of (internal) Covid for over 200 days. Other SE-Asian countries are all doing very well, Japan for example does not have quarantine either.
European lock-down policies have been a monumental failure. Not good enough to stop the spread. But ruining the economy (and everybody's fun). It is truly remarkable that Europeans agree with being locked away for nearly one year now with little to show for, while other societies achieve much better results with different, and less drastic measures. No curiosity at all, it seems, even to understand why Taiwan, Japan and other countries succeed! SMH
Some countries have done better than others. Spain, France, and Italy have all done badly, but Germany and Portugal have much better outcomes than the UK.
The point about test and trace plus limited lockdowns is that you can play whack-a-mole with clusters, which does a far better job of preventing transmission than anything short of a vaccine.
Countries with aggressive test and trace and compulsory self-isolation have done best of all - and with limited economic damage.
None of this should be rocket science, but apparently it's not a priority for the UK government which has literally used a deadly pandemic as an excuse to hand out billions of pounds of public cash to mates, cronies, and party donors. With no expectation of any effective service provision in return.
Literally. That is not exaggeration in any way. It's on the record - including some court records - that the UK gov has been doing this.
aggressive test and trace
compulsory self-isolation
Yes.
An interesting question is why that has not been possible in European countries. A high-ranking politician of my acquaintance stated privately, and very clearly, that it was exaggerated concern for privacy (of a population that has no concern using the products of Facebook, Google and similar trackers, not to mention mobile phones), stoked by a "privacy maffia", made meaningful test and trace (along the lines of Taiwan and other SE Asian states) political suicide, which is why him and others, despite knowing better, did not bother floating this.
Masks might slow it, but they're everywhere in the Bay Area, and cases are rising faster than ever, and we're setting new records for new cases, so "just wear a mask in public" isn't enough.
I think the argument is that masks are an essentially effortless tactic, and if people can't even bother to put them on and the government doesn't seem to care very much, then what hope is there for more effective measures?
I don't live in the UK, just explaining how I read this comment.
> I think the argument is that masks are an essentially effortless tactic
Masks are effortless, but there is also a lot of reason to believe they are not nearly as effective as was sold to people in the early summer.
At some point we get into "just wear a crucifix to ward off the Devil" territory of superstition.
Masks are obviously helpful at preventing transmission of some illnesses, but I've seen enough evidence that Coronavirus spreads via aerosol to not really trust the things.
That is not an accurate summary of the study. Emphasis mine:
> Limitation: Inconclusive results, missing data, variable adherence, patient-reported findings on home tests, no blinding, and no assessment of whether masks could decrease disease transmission from mask wearers to others.
> The recommendation to wear surgical masks to supplement other public health measures did not reduce the SARS-CoV-2 infection rate among wearers by more than 50% in a community with modest infection rates, some degree of social distancing, and uncommon general mask use. The data were compatible with lesser degrees of self-protection.
I don't think any public health experts are saying "wear a mask and you'll be safe", they're saying "if everybody wears a mask, that will slow the infection rate". A study of a community with "uncommon general mask use" does not dispute this.
Finally, I don't think it's clear that a randomized controlled trial is the best method to answer this question. Aside from ethical concerns, you can't give someone a placebo mask. Shouldn't we assume that people will behave differently when they're wearing a mask?
I made an accurate summary of the study. From the Results:
"Although the difference observed was not statistically significant, the 95% CIs are compatible with a 46% reduction to a 23% increase in infection."
The points you are raising about limitations in no way affect the conclusion of the work. Short of putting infected people in a room with uninfected people, there is no ethical way to test the hypothesis that "masks could decrease disease transmission from mask wearers to others".
But since it's pretty unlikely that masks are effective in one direction only, this is the highest-quality evidence we have that they have no effect in one of the two directions.
> Finally, I don't think it's clear that a randomized controlled trial is the best method to answer this question.
A randomized controlled trial is always the gold standard for an intervention of this sort. But yeah, you can't do one for that hypothesis. So you're stuck with something that is fundamentally un-falsifiable. The best you can do is try to do what people have done so far: look at populations, and see if mask mandates make any difference, or ask people who caught Covid if they wore masks, or do similar things within families.
This is called retrospective cohort analysis, and it is low-quality evidence, at best.
> Aside from ethical concerns, you can't give someone a placebo mask. Shouldn't we assume that people will behave differently when they're wearing a mask?
Yes, we should assume that this might happen. It could well be true that wearing a mask makes people be more careless about distancing, for example. This is called "risk compensation", and is a well-known phenomenon in public health.
It seems to me that you're trying to fight two battles at once.
1. do masks inhibit production of and exposure to aerosols carrying SARS-COV-2? This seems (to me) to me clearly established, and essentially irrefutable.
2. do mask mandates reduce the spread of COVID19? this is an entirely different question, and has almost nothing whatsoever to do with the abilities of masks referenced in (1) above.
I would suggest that we know that the answer to (1) is yes, without doubt, but we have only hand-wavy answers to (2). That's still quite different from what you're claiming.
> do masks inhibit production of and exposure to aerosols carrying SARS-COV-2? This seems (to me) to me clearly established, and essentially irrefutable.
Aerosols? It's far from established. In fact, it's a dubious claim, unless you're far more specific about what you mean by "masks". The best laboratory studies show that properly fitted respirators (i.e. as used in hospitals), can reduce aerosol emissions. But few people are wearing respirators, and essentially nobody is fitting them correctly.
Cloth masks? Surgical masks? Cup masks? About the only claim you can make is that they might reduce heavy droplets and then, only by about 30% or so. There's no reason to believe they have any effect on aerosol emission.
Anyone who has done a mask fitting -- where they put you in a room with vaporized stuff that you can taste to detect leaks -- will tell you how difficult it is to get an aerosol-resistant seal on a mask. The chances that the general public is doing it is 0%.
Data regarding the “real-world” effectiveness of community masking are limited to observational and epidemiological studies.
* An investigation of a high-exposure event, in which 2 symptomatically ill hair stylists interacted for an average of 15 minutes with each of 139 clients during an 8-day period, found that none of the 67 clients who subsequently consented to an interview and testing developed infection. The stylists and all clients universally wore masks in the salon as required by local ordinance and company policy at the time.
* In a study of 124 Beijing households with > 1 laboratory-confirmed case of SARS-CoV-2 infection, mask use by the index patient and family contacts before the index patient developed symptoms reduced secondary transmission within the households by 79%.
* A retrospective case-control study from Thailand documented that, among more than 1,000 persons interviewed as part of contact tracing investigations, those who reported having always worn a mask during high-risk exposures experienced a greater than 70% reduced risk of acquiring infection compared with persons who did not wear masks under these circumstances.
* A study of an outbreak aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt, an environment notable for congregate living quarters and close working environments, found that use of face coverings on-board was associated with a 70% reduced risk.
* Investigations involving infected passengers aboard flights longer than 10 hours strongly suggest that masking prevented in-flight transmissions, as demonstrated by the absence of infection developing in other passengers and crew in the 14 days following exposure.
Seven studies have confirmed the benefit of universal masking in community level analyses: in a unified hospital system, a German city, a U.S. state, a panel of 15 U.S. states and Washington, D.C. as well as both Canada and the U.S. nationally. Each analysis demonstrated that, following directives from organizational and political leadership for universal masking, new infections fell significantly. Two of these studies and an additional analysis of data from 200 countries that included the U.S. also demonstrated reductions in mortality. An economic analysis using U.S. data found that, given these effects, increasing universal masking by 15% could prevent the need for lockdowns and reduce associated losses of up to $1 trillion or about 5% of gross domestic product.
> in a unified hospital system, a German city, a U.S. state, a panel of 15 U.S. states and Washington, D.C. as well as both Canada and the U.S. nationally. Each analysis demonstrated that, following directives from organizational and political leadership for universal masking, new infections fell significantly. Two of these studies and an additional analysis of data from 200 countries that included the U.S. also demonstrated reductions in mortality. An economic analysis using U.S. data found that, given these effects, increasing universal masking by 15% could prevent the need for lockdowns and reduce associated losses of up to $1 trillion or about 5% of gross domestic product.
All of these studies were conducted on data from the spring, when cases were declining across the northern hemisphere. How are these places doing now?
Anyone who attempted to conduct a similar analysis today would have to credibly conclude that masks have no protective effect whatsoever. But who knows...maybe they slightly alter the slope of the curve. It's impossible to tell without a controlled trial.
The german paper is particularly ironic, given that it was published approximately concurrently with a huge increase in diagnosed cases in the same city, which is now at all-time highs for the year:
> Anyone who attempted to conduct a similar analysis today would have to credibly conclude that masks have no protective effect whatsoever.
Absolutely not the case. It would be just as credible, as has been noted by others in the comments here, to suggest that the major cause of spread is unmasked private gatherings.
> But who knows...maybe they slightly alter the slope of the curve. It's impossible to tell without a controlled trial.
I agree that without controlled trials, it is very difficult to tell definitively. That does not, however, translate into "there are lots of reasons to doubt ..."
Infection with SARS-CoV-2 occurred in 42 participants recommended masks (1.8%) and 53 control participants (2.1%). The between-group difference was −0.3 percentage point (95% CI, −1.2 to 0.4 percentage point; P = 0.38) (odds ratio, 0.82 [CI, 0.54 to 1.23]; P = 0.33). Multiple imputation accounting for loss to follow-up yielded similar results. Although the difference observed was not statistically significant, the 95% CIs are compatible with a 46% reduction to a 23% increase in infection.
No statistically significant protective effect for the wearer, but as the study points out, it says nothing about protection of those around the wearer, which is the commonly accepted reason for mask wearing.
For what it's worth, this doesn't mean anything (by this I mean that literally, you have gained zero bits of information from this result, and should be exactly as confident as you were before the study)
Read the latter half of that sentence again. Think about what it means. You can't just pay attention to the part of the sentence that you like, and ignore the other parts.
Also, I quoted this exact line in a comment below, so I'm not sure how you can credibly claim that I'm "mis-representing" something.
They obviously don't offer 100% protection. Though I've heard a nice analogy by Christian Drosten on the popular German coronavirus podcast:
Imagine you are standing close to someone at a party who starts talking to you. You immediately notice their bad breath (~aerosols). Now imagine they are wearing a mask, then imagine you both are. How much of the bad breath would you still notice in each case? That's the effect of masks.
Those sorts of comparisons are good at making the mechanism or action understandable, but that's about it. The huge thing they miss is if masks only somewhat effective, but people wearing them act like they're moderately effective. The real-world, systemic parts of this is where it gets complicated and interesting.
Lots of things are "effortless tactics". If they don't work, it's just superstition. People will figure it out, and they'll stop believing you. If you have indoor mask mandates, and outside mask mandates, and shut down restaurants, and curfews, etc., and your cases are still shooting up, you're going to have a hard time getting faith in your actions.
So much of what governments are doing in response to this are just cargo cult science. We've had ample time to run proper controlled trials for much of this stuff -- the Danes were able to do so with masks [1], and there was a big study of gyms out of Norway [2] -- it's simply pathetic that our governments mostly haven't bothered.
Masks can make a significant difference when new cases per infection is near 1. Dropping it from 3 to 2 doesn’t matter has that’s still heavy exponential growth, dropping it from 0.5 to 0.25 again doesn’t matter because it’s dropping fast. However dropping from 1.05 to even 0.95 is huge.
In theory, any tiny reduction in infection rate can make the decisive difference when the number of new infections from each existing infection is close enough to one. In practice, this is extremely unlikely to work in the real world because in reality, this is not some universal constant that is fixed at a particular value everywhere by some physical law - it varies from place to place, from job to job, from community to community, and the ones where it's below 1 will end up representing an exponentially smaller fraction of cases compared to the ones where it's above 1 meaning that the overall average won't stay below 1 for long.
Treating R, the number of infections from each case, as though it was the same everywhere is just a way of simplifying the model, but the map is not the territory and we need to be a lot more careful about whether our simplifying assumptions change the overall behaviour of the system being modelled than we have been.
It’s not about an abstract model, there are feedback loops involved. Shutdowns and people’s behavior responds to the number of new infections. Globally across the last 6 months, new infections are close to 1:1 because you don’t exponential growth. Just look at the three waves in the US.
In effect masks buy you a more open environment where people can leave their homes and do more stuff. Further, when locations decide to shutdown that shutdown is more effective.
Nothing I wrote was an argument about masks. I linked to the one RCT on masks (as PPE) done in 2020, to illustrate that it's possible to do high-quality studies of these kinds of interventions, and underline the point that politicians are mostly just guessing, and people can see this.
You're grinding an axe here, but it has little to do with what I wrote.
Did someone claim it was? The name of the game is and has always been suppressing the transmission rate of the virus. Masks are a low impact way to help a little bit towards that goal, nothing more.
I was responding to someone in London saying they don't see most people wearing masks in public places. They didn't explicitly say it was enough, but since that was their main criticism of how London is responding, it read like that.
Here's what Biden said:
> The first day I'm inaugurated to say I'm going to ask the public for 100 days to mask. Just 100 days to mask, not forever. One hundred days.
Again, he didn't say that wearing a mask is enough, but with the 100-day timeline, reading between the lines, he's saying it will drive down the case count.
Same here in Massachusetts. Universal masking since May 6th, the governor even did away with "except of >6ft from others when outside rule" in the beginning of November, and we're seeing more cases than ever.
Melbourne started their lockdown in winter. Everyone obeyed it. It was strongly enforced [1, 2]. They beat coronavirus. And now they can enjoy their summer.
I live in London. At one point in the summer, our covid rates were lower than Melbourne's. But the UK's messaging was confused and contradictory ("eat out to help out", test and trace was shambolic, rules were not enforced). So no one is the least surprised that it has got out of control again so quickly.
[1] My parents live half an hour's drive from Melbourne. Police stopped every car on the highways to enforce no travel, fined the drivers and made them turn back home.
[2] One party of 26 people got busted ordering KFC to the same address and fined $26,000.
I don't think I was, but every journey starts with the first step ;-). I think the Australian confidence of 'having eradicated covid' is misplaced. You can only eradicate a virus if you do that worldwide, and given viruses' capability of mutating, I think that's an unattainable goal.
That's in Sydney, which is over 700km away. It is also nothing like the scale that the UK is dealing with and will hopefully be dealt with by a short lockdown - possibly not even of the entire city of the politicians pull their finger out quickly enough.
Yeah, raarts is trying to burn us by taking this sudden reappareance of a whole 30 cases in NSW seriously. Because here in Australia we take it that seriously.
Short lockdown maybe, back to normal soon, not too many other places will be able to brag about that.
We will be able to save all the lives prior to vaccination that nations with less willpower seem willing to spend.
Firstly, the UK response has been terrible, Australia far better.
However there are several contributing factors and it certainly doesn’t come down to mask use as the primary one as mask discipline in the UK hasn’t been bad in my experience.
This is a seasonal disease (the main reason for the UK summer reprieve), and it’s now summer in Australia, and they have also been far better at quarantines and contact tracing and have used this period wisely to get the disease under control. All these factors matter in a response, and the UK has suffered from panic management and a lack of difficult measures at the right time and is now entering the peak season for this sort of virus so things will get worse for a month or two at least, even with a new lockdown.
> What worked in Melbourne was that 8 months of house arrest for everyone living in the city...
The .au epidemiologists I've heard on NPR have made it clear that what worked in Melbourne was everything they did, including a lockdown and including contact tracing.
If only the UK had the same level of government as Melbourne and Singapore and Japan and South Korea and New Zealand and all the other places that did that...
I'm not sure that's completely fair. Countries vary so much that putting it down to "the government" ignores all the other factors. You're examples are all on the southern hemisphere, with mostly nice weather where people spend more time outside. General population health also has a massive effect. Here in the UK we are a nation of overweight old people, but fat-shaming is a thing so that's only going to get worse.
But those antipodean countries are all coming out of their winter. So they got through the worst of it during the coldest part of the year, with more people indoors, and only now are getting into summer.
Not sure why you are all focusing on my example with the weather. Like I said there are many factors involved here, with the weather being one of them.
I completely agree with your overall point, that there are too many confounding factors to reliably attribute anything to government actions. I guess I just couldn't resist the urge to nit.
the concept of velocity is too hard for people to grasp
they need binary good/bad cause/effect edicts, like children. state and municipal governments are poorly catering to their own velocity based directives, and the juvenile more simplistic expectations of their population.
Every store I've gone in has required them, I've heard mass transit is a lot less crowded and also requires them, and I think county rules mandate them in those cases. I've seen people without them going on outdoor walks, but that's an incredibly low-risk activity.
Yes, she has been tested for active Covid about a half-dozen times with both the fast (15 min) and slower tests. We wanted to make extremely sure she wasn't an asymptomatic carrier who could give it to her elderly parents.
She didn't get tested for antibodies as the health system has far more important things to deal with right now in the US, unfortunately.
I spent a week in a small apartment with someone who had symptomatic Covid. Close contact the whole
time. Neither of us wore masks.
I never got it.
An anecdote means very little, and certainly is not evidence that masks work without controls for every other thing that might have prevented you from getting infected.
> Supermarkets continue to be rammed, but staff aren't required to wear masks.
The wearing of masks by retail employees has been mandatory in England since 24th September [1].
Up here in Manchester I don't recall seeing any supermarket workers not wearing them. I can easily believe that conditions in London are different though.
I think the problem is that people don’t want to enforce it because 1 in 50 people you try this on are likely to go batshit insane almost instantly. No one wants to deal with that.
At the end of the day this whole thing is dependent on the weakest link and there are a lot of weak links in society.
> The attitude here is rapidly becoming "why should I bother if no one else is?". And frankly, I think the government know and encourage this. Its all but policy. Time and again we see them decline scientific advice, then act surprised when infection rates spike.
They always believed in "herd immunity", so they're going to run with the minimum restrictions that achieve an ""acceptable"" death rate.
We still don't have a great picture of what's driving the infections, due to the failure of track&trace. I suspect it's schools, universities, workplaces, and (unfortunately) hospitals, but I don't have handy evidence for that.
Having Folkestone jammed with containers of undistributed PPE while the clock runs down to the Brexit logistics crisis isn't helping either.
Anyway, the Tory public have been inexplicably satisfied with the performance so far, and are probably going to widely ignore the last-minute changes to Christmas rules.
People are operating on instincts that amount to something like 'the choices are the 80-year olds die im five years instead of now, or we all ruin years of our lives and hand over more power to the petty little tyrants who thrive under lockdowns. Sorry, grandma, but you were on your way out, anyway'.
Of course, that's not acceptable to say. Hence all the normal people say whatever they have to to get along and do otherwise (as usual) and True Believers are increasingly confused, angry, and disillusioned (as usual).
'Getting the measures right' would require some mix of unity (which doesn't exist in modern multicultural countries) and/or a strong authoritarian government. If, for some reason, you like not having indigenous racial minorities sent to re-education camps while you're not looking, then those options aren't really available.
If there were a country with the nerve to have no 'measures' at all, they would have herd immunity, a pile of corpses, some long-term health conditions from covid (that we will have, too- everyone's getting this thing), no long-term health conditions from everyone being locked in their homes for a year, no year+ fucking of the economy, less consolidation of wealth into the hands of a few, less of an immediate risk of an increase in authoritarianism via increasing the power of the local government...
For some size of 'a discrepancy in the pile of corpses (from this year)', I would, if I could push a button and switch to the world where people were left to do as they may, push it. A lot of people would, too, it's just too callous and inhuman to admit that yeah, sorry, if you're 85 and going to die in 3 years from the flu anyway your continued life might not be worth the price of greatly inconveniencing a 25-year-old for a year.
I'm in the home counties around London, and I can see something similar. I actually ran into a pair of covid guards from the council, the only time I've seen them, and I kid you not they had their noses over their masks.
The rules stopped being followed some time ago, and I'll tell you why.
We can't believe in the government anymore, and it's because there's been too many cases of one rule for the people, one for the rulers. Multiple government level staff have been caught breaking the rules. Cummings was maybe the most egregious case, a known positive driving hundreds of miles to his parents, who is then protected by the PM from sacking. On top of that, when he actually did get sacked it was due to a petty internal power struggle months later, with no mention of the breach. Then there was the scientist with the affair, the MP who took the train back to Scotland, and so on. Plus stories of cronyism in who was given contracts to service the covid needs.
I can see why people think the rules are a theatre. They obviously don't think the rules matter, or that it matters whether we get the required projects done by competent people.
We elected a talker to waffle his way through the Brexit negotiations. That would have worked, because those treaties are impenetrable to normal people; He can do a bit of clever rhetoric to talk up this or that point, and nobody is any wiser because they won't know what it's like to be a cheese import business with no voice in the media. Now the game is up, because you can't talk your way out of a global pandemic, it's too far from normal politics to have practiced stepping around.
Authoritative collectivist monocultures are also better at controlling the media and banned disagreement with the government position. All we hear is they are doing a good job so it must be true.
I don't consider less-inclusive political systems worse. They have best, average and worse cases, where the problem is that they get worst case many times over. A benevolent dictatorship is capable of getting the best case results, the predictable threat is that their replacement will not be capable of stewarding resources the same way.
Whereas more inclusive political systems get average case results more reliably and it is practically impossible to get a best case result with a lot of energy continually necessary to avoid worst case results.
Collectivist:
I don't consider collectivist to be a pejorative term and don't know of any context where it is. You picked a synonym, selfless.
Monoculture:
Just a fact of life. Where monocultures help them be able to predict what their neighbor does and trust that result, then large-scale immediate coordination without the state is easy. It isn't impossible for a multicultural society to achieve the same benefits, its also not happening. Unlike others that might use this word, I am not making any statement on a preferred living arrangement.
when a word is indeed "not inherently [an] insult", but is a de facto one for millions of people, I'm not clear what is gained by pointing out dictionary definitions or alternative reactions to the term.
China is a sensible, mature, selfless society? I’m sure the Uighurs would have opinions that differ. Also let’s not forget Tiananmen Square and what those students would say.
And islands. Australia may be a continent, but its low population density and lack of roads connecting it to more populous regions is certainly a contributing factor. All of the countries doing best are either authoritarian or effectively political islands (Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, Taiwan, China).
"Australia" has a low population density because most of it has close to no population; it's easy to be mislead by this if you're not aware of how the population is distributed within a huge area, but the areas where most people live do not have low population density. It's heavily urbanised (more so than the UK), with the vast majority of the population living in reasonably dense metropolitan areas.
It's the willingness and ability to take effective measures, not the geography, that matters.
If geography and population density have nothing to do with it, then I suppose California isn't one of the world epicenters right now.
Australia has a lower population than California, by the way. Obviously, its pop is mostly spread over the east coast, but compared to the UK it's extremely sparse, with no tunnels connecting it to the mainland. It's disingenuous (at best) to think that the island nations that had successful lockdowns were all doing something magically better than other places with significant restrictions to daily life like France, Italy, California, etc. because they couldn't realistically close their borders to ground traffic.
Population density has something to do with it, you're just mistaken about the population density of Australia where people actually live.
And obviously you can close a land border as well, it's just a matter of whether you're willing to do it. Australia also imposed tight restrictions on most of the land borders between states.
My understanding of the situation in new zealand is that at the beginning of the pandemic (back in march) they knew their health systems weren't up to the job - NZ's health system is kind of bad - so they took decisive action to ensure they could keep the pandemic under control. I think they're a bit better now but they still lack confidence in their health system.
Here, nearby in NSW our public health system is really good. We're currently dealing with out third significant outbreak - seems to be an escape from an overseas arrival - but we can justifiably be confident that we are able to stamp these things out without too much disruption (relatively speaking).
It is probably the most connected not-tiny island.
(One of the world's biggest airports, several of Europe's busiest, frequent direct rail connection to the continent, frequent ferries on many routes, fully integrated free trade + work zone.)
"According to Getlink, the company which operates the Channel Tunnel, 1.64 million trucks traveled between the UK and the EU using the crossing last year. More than 2.5 million cars made the crossing, as did 51,229 buses and 2,012 freight trains.
Added to the even greater volumes of truck crossings made on ferries — the Port of Dover handled a record 2.6 million trucks in 2017, according to its own figures — it accounts for a massive annual volume."
... you can still unload freight. You limit the movement of people though.
People love to make excuses or put up obstructions to an idea, but solutions are almost always achievable with a little planning, resources and the will to make it happen.
The comedy of errors around the government has probably been worse though.
Barnard Castle alone probably killed thousands, the way this government is doing contracts is probably criminal, we fucked up the T&T for months etc. etc. etc. etc.
A comedy of errors assumes some level of ignorance or carelessness, but we have 10 years (and counting) of empirical evidence that this government is acting out of nothing but self-preservation and malice.
Voting Mr Bean into office would constitute a comedy of errors; but what we have now (when you also throw Brexit into the mix) is far from funny.
It'd also have meant severing food supply chains (and probably also medical supply chains and a bunch of others). The UK relies on trucks coming across from the continent and continuing on to destinations throughout the country with their original drivers. Ending that would make Brexit look like a walk in the park by comparison. Also, you've got to remember that the time period during which the UK would've had to do this for it to be effective was one where the WHO and all the right-thinking people were insisting that border restrictions were counterproductive, xenophobic and made things worse, something Trump would do, and when Italy still incorrectly believed they had zero cases.
How about this: https://www.containcovid-pan.eu/? Choice quote: Given open borders within Europe, a single country alone cannot keep the number of COVID-19 cases low
Let's reverse the burden of evidence, and request [citation needed] for your implicit claim that the open borders lobby is not relevant here?
It wouldn't have been that hard to implement quarantine for truck drivers (cleaning cabs and switching drivers at the crossing, etc). Not trivial. But not that hard either. There would be no need to shut down the supply chains.
> the WHO and all the right-thinking people were insisting that border restrictions were counterproductive,
I'd argue that these were very much the wrong-thinking people. And that the WHO advice has been pretty terrible throughout. It seems obvious to me that closing borders is appropriate in a pandemic. The UK still hasn't done this. Lots of people were going abroad on holiday between lockdowns.
> The UK relies on trucks coming across from the continent and continuing on to destinations throughout the country with their original drivers.
I'm not familiar with freight in Europe, so please excuse the diversion.
They drive freight vehicles onto the Eurotunnel Shuttle or on ferries? I'm guessing this isn't containerized freight, which would seem to make sense to transfer to freight rail (at least to cross the channel).
All of them (there is also plenty of containerized freight on ships).
With the very porous border, there is little lost time through checks -- it was easy to send the driver all the way from Germany to Manchester. I think from leaving the French motorway to driving onto the British one takes about an hour by lorry-on-train.
By ferry, it's little different than going from Germany to Denmark by ferry. They will glance at the passport as well as the ticket.
> They drive freight vehicles onto the Eurotunnel Shuttle or on ferries?
Both, although more volume goes through the ferries. (tunnel trains is 1.5 million trucks a year or something in that ballpark if I remember correctly)
Now that France has closed the border (first time ever?) we have some numbers:
“To put this into context, there are about 6,000 vehicles we would expect, just under in Dover today, probably I’d say 4,000 would have gone across from Dover, just under 2,000 on the Eurotunnel,” he said.
“But there’s probably something like 32,000 units that would have been the daily total so the vast majority including virtually all the vaccine actually comes via container.”
Containers will mostly be on ships, but some will come on normal freight trains. (Eurotunnel is the lorries-on-trains service.)
See table 2 in the most recent weekly national COVID-19 surveillance report [1], which breaks down where outbreaks have happened. In London, there were 220 outbreaks last week:
Educational 108
Hospital 42
Care home 38
Workplace 20
Other 10
Prisons 1
Food outlet/restaurant 1
This is outbreaks, not infections - i don't think we have statistics on that, so this is the best indication we have of where the virus is spreading.
Schools, hospitals, care homes, and workplaces account for the huge majority of spread. There's no empirical reason to think either tube trains or supermarkets are the problem.
One needs to be careful with such statistics though. The Netherlands had similar numbers but luckily also reported they could only trace 20% of the outbreaks. And that puts things in a very different perspective.
Of the traced outbreaks, most were in schools. But that is not really a surprise, as outbreaks in schools are really easy to trace. If you have a group of 25 students which basically spend 40 hours a week together and they all get sick, super obvious. But how do you trace clients of a restaurant back to a restaurant? You mostly don't.
My reading of these lists is as a mix between places that are easy to trace, and places where really a lot of infections are happening. It is hard to tell which are which and which are both. Not to mention where the other missing 80% of cases came from.
Edit, ignore the next paragraph, I was looking at this week vs last wekk...
Weirdly I see slightly different numbers... Table 2 on page number 26 of the first pdf? Sorry if I'm looking in the wrong place...
Either way, I think this relies on contact tracing data, but contact tracing doesn't happen on trains or in supermarkets (super markets are exempt why exactly? No one knows). That's why their zeros...
Both are places where a huge number of people pass, and nearly nobody stays for long. I imagine both would give a very large number of false positives, so you'll need a lot of work to get little impact.
Just been to the Tesco at Roneo Corner in Havering (1 borough further out than Barking and Dageham).
38 customers without a mask inside the store (excludes kids even teens, excludes anyone with a pointless visor, excludes anyone with a green and yellow lanyard which means they're exempt).
8 members of staff without a mask (again, excluding as above).
Highlights include:
* a woman in Islamic dress with a head scarf and eye veil, she had covered every inch of her skin EXCEPT for her mouth and nose.
* a staff member with a managers badge and no mask
* a parent who took off his mask and gave it to his baby to play with once he was inside
* an aisle with about 40 people crammed in looking at the discount section with a staff member with no mask holding a "2m social distance" sign and getting in people's way, but not stopping them or asking anyone to move on!?
I'm pretty shocked staff in supermarket employees aren't required to wear masks in London.
But this isn't really true: "One staff member with covid will rapidly infect a few 1000 people given how busy they are on a Saturday morning.
Covid is pretty contagious, but you really need to be around someone for ~15 minutes to have a good chance of infecting them. Superspreading events can occur, but they are fairly rare.
I bet supermarkets aren't big transmission vectors.
> If you just want the results: one person (Case B) infected two other people (case A and C) from a distance away of 6.5 meters (~21 feet) and 4.8m (~15 feet). Case B and case A overlapped for just five minutes at quite a distance away. These people were well beyond the current 6 feet / 2 meter guidelines of CDC and much further than the current 3 feet / one meter distance advocated by the WHO. And they still transmitted the virus.
While it might take some time for an infected person in close proximity to push a specific second person across some risk threshold in a 1-on-1 interaction, that's not the scenario we're worried about.
We're worried about how many people an infected person might infect during many, many interactions.
Even if the probability of infection is low in a single 2 minute interaction, some people in service jobs have thousands of interactions a day. (not all one-on-one).
Covid is pretty contagious, but you really need to be around someone for ~15 minutes to have a good chance of infecting them.
Does that mean that someone has to breath in my virus for 15 minutes before there's enough of it inside them to infect them?
Or does it mean that if I'm the infected staff member constantly spewing virus near an ever-changing cast of shoppers, I can expect to infect about 4 people an hour, some of whom were near me for only seconds?
Exactly my experiences in London. Crazy isn't it? I just don't think people even believe it's real. Half the people with a mask on TFL wear them over their chin or with their nose out anyway.
The uk always has this 2 levels of laws: laws that are passed and laws that are enforced. When a new law is passed people watch to see whether its enforced. This law is not enforced, so it goes in the same category as speed limits.
I remember the 2011 riots, courts were run 24h a day, sentences were extreme and people were tired and convicted the same day as the offense. That's very heavy handed. But that shows you the priority here.
Yup, sorry. Basically the public transport network. So underground and overground trains and buses (mostly - they also licence the cabs and water taxis as well).
The one that makes me laugh is the people who get on the bus and then put their mask on.
And the people outside the supermarket who grab the dirty spray bottle handled by 500 people already, clean their trolley handle but not their hands, then put the mask on their face handling it, then rub their eye and go shopping.
Dagenham is quite a right-wing area? People with right-wing views seems to have been targeted with anti-mask and anti-lockdown misinformation on social media.
My German tutor has declined politely to meet me since March. Cost him a fortune. Every other service provider is still open. My barber just texted to say we're still on for Monday.
I had friends living in London come back home to Australia. (2 weeks in mandatory hotel quarantine on entry)
Apparently the enforcement and compliance with the rules is night and day different here. They described London as a place with rules that everyone just ignores.
Australia is in summer, so it would make more sense to compare it to the UK’s summer, if you insist on comparing two countries with very different population densities (a key factor in the spread of COVID-19).
I'd say that counts against the UK: The UK failed to control this DESPITE lovely weather meaning people don't mind meeting outside and schools being shut anyway. Australia battled this through their winter and won despite the outdoors being basicly shut...
Population densities are not wildly different between the two countries if you realise that most of Australia is effectively unpopulated and the vast majority live in a handful of metropolitan areas.
> One staff member with covid will rapidly infect a few 1000 people given how busy they are on a Saturday morning
Is that really so? As I recall the viral load has to cross a minimal threshold before infection develops, and even then the lower the load the milder the illness.
A store employee with his mouth shut whom you pass by in about 3 seconds is a far cry from someone who is singing at you at 10 ft distance for an hour, or eating and chatting for that same hour.
> One staff member with covid will rapidly infect a few 1000 people given how busy they are on a Saturday morning
That is an enormous over-exaggeration. It's a virus, not a magic spell. Plus, employees are not required to wear masks, but customers are.
> Time and again we see them decline scientific advice
Which scientific advice have they declined? So far as I can see, Boris is entirely under the influence of SAGE and does nothing without "scientific advice".
I agree with every word 100%. Shops, supermarkets, staff, even an NHS clinic allowed someone to talk to reception without a mask..I have asked managers if they are comfortable with the staggering non compliance. “I’ll lose my job” has been their reply. Not surprising a “new strain” has developed.
> Compliance with mask wearing on TFL is less than 50%. "Covid enforcement" officers walk around about one train in 50, and despite it being 8 months since this started, "I don't have one" is an acceptable answer to why you're not wearing a mask.
Is it policy for the officers to pull one out and say 'you do now'?
Supermarkets do that sometimes at the door and good for them. But at this point, I'm tired of people "forgetting". I think it's time for actual enforcement.
Why are religious gatherings exempt? That seems utterly irrational. Surely now of all times is a time for the government to say to religious people “sorry, but we can’t pretend to respect your fantasies right now”.
I live in London, and I couldn't tell you what it's like on the tube or in shops; interesting to hear. But, probably you're also a software engineer working from home, so if it bothers you, how are you able to tell me?
I assume the large majority of tube users are the non compliant, simply because so few of the compliant have any reason to actually need to use the tube, so your 50% doesn't surprise me at all, certainly not that it's low.
> "I don't have one" is an acceptable answer to why you're not wearing a mask.
I haven't worn a mask twice. Once because I forgot it and once because I just forgot to put it on.
If "I don't have one" isn't an acceptable excuse what am I supposed to do: produce one out of thin air? It's not like they give out free ones if you forget. There are so many signs now that they're basically invisible. If I'm fined for not wearing it I'll stop wearing it entirely.
> If "I don't have one" isn't an acceptable excuse what am I supposed to do
How is it that after nearly 10 months of this would you not have a mask?
Do you also think that "sorry officer, I didn't realise that getting completely sloshed and then driving was illegal, what am I supposed to to? Suddenly sober up?"
> If I'm fined for not wearing it I'll stop wearing it entirely.
This makes absolutely no sense.
So you want to be fined daily because you got fined once for not wearing a mask during a pandemic?
And people don't understand why it's spreading so much.
That's like saying
> I was fined for dangerous driving, and because of this I'm now only going to drive on the wrong side of the road.
Offer you one and then fine you. Seriously, don't forget and if you're forgetful then prepare early
I have one in my car, a spare in my backpack, keep one in my jacket pocket, and a cheap disposable in my wallet folded up. That way if I forget, I'll have one.
My city in Australia had a grace period for everyone to get a mask. After that a lot of fines were handed out.
Without fines I doubt we'd have seen compliance anywhere near as high because there are a lot of people who don't want to wear them but do because they fear the fine.
For those (like me) who are looking for some more details of this new strain, I found 2 papers from the `COVID-19 Genomics Consortium UK (CoG-UK)` of great interest. It seems like the prime reasons for concern are increased frequency of mutations, increased proportion of cases, and possible change in immune response
> Several aspects of this cluster are noteworthy for epidemiological and biological reasons and we report preliminary findings below. In summary:
The B.1.1.7 lineage accounts for an increasing proportion of cases in parts of England. The number of B.1.1.7 cases, and the number of regions reporting B.1.1.7 infections, are growing.
B.1.1.7 has an unusually large number of genetic changes, particularly in the spike protein.
Three of these mutations have potential biological effects that have been described previously to varying extents:
> - Mutation N501Y is one of six key contact residues within the receptor-binding domain (RBD) and has been identified as increasing binding affinity to human and murine ACE2.
> - The spike deletion 69-70del has been described in the context of evasion to the human immune response but has also occurred a number of times in association with other RBD changes.
> - Mutation P681H is immediately adjacent to the furin cleavage site, a known location of biological significance.
> The rapid growth of this lineage indicates the need for enhanced genomic and epidemiological surveillance worldwide and laboratory investigations of antigenicity and infectivity.
Anecdotally I know a family where every member tested positive for COVID in the spring with severe symptoms at the time. They recovered, then over thanksgiving they started experiencing very mild symptoms (some none at all, others loss of taste and smell to more typical cold like symptoms), and all tested positive once again.
It might be that after you contracted COVID once, or a particular strain of COVID once, that you have a heightened immune response and less severe symptoms when you do catch the disease again. It is hard to say for sure what is going on from an isolated case, but this certainly doesn't bode well.
How doesn't it bode well? If you get one strain of covid, get over it, then catch another strain and your symptoms are much less than the first time due to your body having the proper defenses against covid, then that's your immune system working as intended.
Is it impossible to get a cold twice in one season? If so, why is catching covid twice a bad thing, especially if the second time is a lot milder than the first time, even for people who experience mild symptoms the first time?
Seemingly not at same rate tho. I guess some specialist can explain it better, but afaik there are some viruses and vaccines where you can spread and some you don’t.
For covid there’s no data yet, but my hunch says it reduces spread only slightly.
Does anyone have insight on how much / specific changes in the spike protein would be needed to render the mRNA vaccines - which to my understanding create only those spikes - would be render less effective or not effective?
The short answer is that 'The extent to which SARS-CoV-2 may evolve to escape immunity induced by infection or vaccination is not currently known'. However analysis has been carried out to work out how far from the receptor-binding site the mutations are, and how 'antibody-accessible' these are, with a few such as . No conclusions are drawn from this analysis.
Earlier on in the report (towards the end of page 1), this statement is given `One of these (the N501Y mutation) occurs in the region of the Spike protein, the receptor binding domain (RBD), that the virus uses to bind to the human ACE2 receptor. Changes in this region of the Spike protein can result in the virus changing its ACE2 binding specificity and alter antibody recognition`.
Saying all this, vaccines are designed to create a range of antibody responses, in order to stop this very fear of a single mutation rendering a whole vaccine useless. [https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02544-6] I also recall reading somewhere that adapting the vaccine to account for a mutation (much like is done yearly with the flue vaccine) is relatively easy, though I haven't managed to find that article again yet.
I've read that COVID-19 can sometimes be found inside the body even after testing negative for some time. This being a reason for continued weakness and impairment after infection.
Could this possibly continued infection lead to faster mutation, or is the amount of people infected the cause for the rapid mutations, or something else?
It's suspected that this mutation arose from a single patient who had a long case of COVID-19. Here's an interesting pre-print study on an individual (not the one from this mutation) who harboured many mutations over a 101-day period. [https://www.cogconsortium.uk/news_item/persistent-sars-cov-2...]
A lot of you missing the context of what's been going on here in recent days - they've seen an unexpected spike in infections and it seems to correlate with a strain with an unusually high number of mutations. So they're not totally sure the new strain is responsible but it looks serious enough to get extra cautious.
By tracking the growth of that strain then reckon it's 70% more easily spread. That could be statistical fluke due to a series of superspreader events or something like that but it seems less likely day by day.
They’ve seen a spike in infections in a densely populated mega city in the busiest shopping weeks of the year, when (anecdotally) people are not taking precautions and social distancing. In what way is that unexpected?
Isn't the South East right now overpopulated with transit? By all accounts, lorry traffic between the UK and mainland Europe has seen a massive spike in these weeks. It seems to me that a lot of that traffic must pass through the South East much more than the other parts of England
True, and that's what I thought a few days ago. But they've also been tracking growth of the new strain at the same time. New strain has been responsible for a growing proportion of positive tests. May be coincidence, but they are being cautious.
Edit: complete conjecture but if new strain is more infectious but less dangerous it might actually be helpful in the long run as it might displace other strains. Fingers crossed
One has to wonder to what extent the new strain is really responsible for this, versus being a convenient excuse for the government's failure to manage the normal variant.
Not quite sure what they thought would happen - lockdown in November and then unlock and open all the shops the three weeks before Christmas and expect everyone to be sensible?
Totally my experiences, but London looks like it hasn't given a shit for weeks.
This is always said “if only we were more competent/oppressive/empathetic people - we’d have done fine” instead of perhaps wondering whether much of the mitigation efforts and their implementation are a fraught and possibly even net-negative exercise.
No other western country has actually been willing to do what NZ or Australia did - strict contact tracing, strict lockdowns, and a near-complete ban on entering the country, with those that do being picked up the police or military at their plane and driven to quarantine hotels where the doors lock from the outside.
I don't know why everyone keeps going on about other countries not getting the same results - no other rich country has even talked about trying, as far as I know.
In fact it’s worse, western nations have done the stupidest thing which is half measures. They’ve wrecked their own economies by taking measly half measures and not providing adequate relief. Wrecking people’s lives without actually achieving meaningful ends.
At risk of being labelled “anti-lockdown” or whatever, i’ll clarify my point is we should have done MORE. Strict lockdowns, tracing, etc... AND providing direct relief and freezes.
Led by the US with a president that would change his mind about COVID three times in two sentences. Somehow the rest of the "free" world decided that emulating this mess is a worthwhile venture.
The argument is not that the experts failed, but that the politicians did. In general the experts have argued for more "oppressive" approaches, because those are the only ones that have worked.
I’m tired of hearing excuses. 20% of New Zealand export income[1] came from tourism, yet we closed the doors on February 1st, cancelling tourists while the season was still high.
If you want to get rid of the virus, you can, but you have to suck up the costs: shut down your borders and do whatever it takes. Close down internal travel: domestic flights were virtually shutdown in NZ; Ozzie’s had other overland travel restrictions between states etcetera. Stay at home: fuck the economy for a while, but then you all can relax.
NZ is about the same size and population as Oregon, so a single state could choose to do it, if they were willing to face up to the implications of the choice.
There is still time to do it now, to give yourselves enough time to vaccinate people that would be network nodes in the transmission graph, and health workers, and the at-risk population.
Or be honest like Sweden and decide that some deaths and chronic repercussions are acceptable costs (versus the alternative economic and human damage.)
But don’t give lame just-right excuses like “Australia is an island with a population almost half California.” Oz has a higher population than every other state except Texas, so....
> NZ is about the same size and population as Oregon, so a single state could choose to do it, if they were willing to face up to the implications of the choice.
In the US, some of the relevant choices have to be made at the Federal level.
For example, Oregon does not have authority to close state borders to travellers from other states or countries.
Just want to point out that US states aren't allowed to run a deficit, while countries are, so I mostly agree with this but this hamstrings states like Oregon who aren't allowed to provide relief for strict measures through debt. Also Oregonians would have to still contribute to the Federal government via taxes, essentially stealing more money from this plan.
Excuses. If the state really wants to do something, they can. It is just a question of the costs.
NZ is not a state, but instead has a precarious relationship with the USA and other countries, which can ban-hammer us for things it really shouldn’t have any say in.
A better example: “Since Canberra pointedly demanded an investigation into the origins and spread of the coronavirus, the number of Aussie businesses being squeezed in China has exploded. Crates of Australian rock lobsters have been left to rot at a Chinese airport, and mountains of coal have been stuck in Chinese ports. Beijing turned the screw again, hitting Australian wine exports with punitive tariffs of up to 212 percent, essentially closing off a US$1 billion market.” “Australia's virus-weakened economy is being targeted for political retribution and the two countries may be sliding into a shadow trade war.”
Not a state, but American Samoa's governor ordered the ports closed in 1917 and allowed no ships to dock. They escaped the flu pandemic with zero cases.
There’s no way a US state could have done it, especially with Donald Trump at the helm.
The federal government certainly could have done a lot better. But frankly, even a federal government that didn’t do anything would have been better than the current one which was promoting snake oil, and not promoting wearing masks or social distancing but working actively against them.
In other words immiserate anyone who’s not a comfortable white-collar person that can hole up in their home, Zoom to work, and dispatch immigrants to deliver food
By suck up the costs I believe the parent is referring not just to the economic pain but also the cost of the extensive and unprecedented government support that Australia and NZ (and even in fact the UK) made.
Unemployment benefits and the aged pension were raised significantly, employers were paid a subsidy to continue to employ people of income dropped by 30% or more from the jan quarter 12 months earlier - and the support is clacheduled to continue until March at present.
This was also exceptionally well distributed and applied in almost no time.
I suspect your perceptions are coloured by your environs: what do you know of NZ and Oz? The poor in New Zealand and Oz were not hit any harder than the middle-class and wealthy people that lost their savings due to circumstances e.g. businesses going under.
I personally don’t know of any restaurant that had to close due to Covid (and most restaurants are close to the edge during normal times).
My friends on unemployment benefits and requiring state healthcare would prefer not to be, in other circumstances, but they muddle through e.g. one friend needed emergency care the other day (free), and another friend needs their gall-bladder removed (free). And Covid is low (or no) risk even for the most unlucky jobs.
I really don't understand the island fixation that so many seem to have. Is it just accepted that non-island nations are incapable of policing their borders?
I think the argument is that other nations have economies that depend much more heavily on interaction with their neighbours. Which is probably true to an extent. But I mostly agree with you that this option was open to other countries.
As an inhabitant of the Netherlands, I would be very surprised if we would police our border with either Belgium or Germany. There are no natural obstacles, and plenty of spaces with forest crossing the border. No-one but the military comes close to having enough man-power to enforce that border.
Sure, with actual army deployment we could get somewhere (it seems we have about 20 soldiers per kilometer of border). But the massive difference in effort between "police airports and the coast with radar" and "Mobilize the army" is huge.
The same could be said of Australia's internal borders, which were largely closed as well. Most people will follow the rules, so simply closing the borders will get you most of the way there.
The issue is not whether it's possible - it is - it's whether the cost of doing so is too high. It's a fair consideration to make, but it should be clear that that's the consideration being made, rather than pretending that only island nations have this option.
These comparisons are so lax. NZ is in summer right now, and is a remote island on the other side of the planet from Italy where the virus first really went crazy.
The U.K. government is beyond contempt, but these comparisons don’t help.
NZ is not an international flight hub. Heathrow was the busiest airport in Europe prior to COVID (it is not anymore).
NZ has done exceptionally well and I don't want to take away from it at all! But it would be dishonest to say that they faced challenges of the same magnitude.
I suggest that New Zealand is the most comparable country to the UK in its challenges - being islands dependent on outside trade and with an economy heavy on services and tourism. (plus, NZ's primary trading partner is China).
They haven't faced challenges of the same magnitude only because they took action to stop an outbreak from starting, at the earliest opportunity. That's the only meaningful difference in how things have played out.
They passed the same challenges that the UK failed.
You might want to check the news on South Korea. They're hitting daily records right now. This isn't to say they're at US levels, but with their current measures, they don't have control of the virus.
That's not the point. My only point is their r0 has been above 1 since early November. They went from 100 news cases per day to 1000 in a month and a half. That isn't "succeed[ing] at containing this virus."
> That isn't "succeed[ing] at containing this virus."
I would assume this is a new generation (new wild-type) which has been reintroduced from the West. As such, Korea did succeed at containing the virus: their only problem is that Western countries didn't bother and made the problem magnitudes more difficult for everyone.
Im pretty sure the standard is not having the virus under control 100% of the time. If you do, it’s almost certainly because you have erred way too far on the cautious side.
The standard is keeping the virus well under control for the majority of the time, ans when you do have a flare up, bringing it back under control before it becomes too bad.
It's been bloody obvious for months that South Korea can't control Covid through test and trace alone without massive, economically-damaging social distancing and business closure measures - every time they lift them cases go up, and there's been a worrying increase in cases not linked to any previous known cases which implies an exponentially increasing pool of unknown infections entirely unimpacted by contact tracing. (They also have massively less testing than the UK and European countries, so they're probably detecting a small fraction of those unlinked cases.) One of the big things which seems to have changed in South Korea is that unlike the last few times there's no longer the political will to impose those restrictions. You wouldn't have known this from the British press, which has been pushing hard on the idea that they succeeded at this to convince people that our country could've too if it wasn't for our incompetent government (which they hate due to Brexit).
More generally, the press here almost exclusively report the facts that make the UK look like a failure and South Korea look like a success. So for example, the BBC reported on the removal of those social distancing measures, framing it as proof that South Korea's test and trace was so effective they could even reopen nightclubs... like, the day after they did, but making it sound like something they'd done a while ago with no ill effects. They then ran loads of reports on important topics like BTS whilst ignoring the explosion in cases. So everyone who gets their news from the British press is convinced that our government is incompetent, keeps on doing U-turns that damage businesses and the economy, recklessly reopened knowing it would result in the virus spreading, is behind the rest of the world in Covid testing, etc when we should've acted like South Korea... when in reality South Korea was even more like that and if the UK government had taken the same actions they'd have been described in that exact same negative way rather than glossed over and omitted. It's a complete and utter media illusion.
The British government is utterly incompetent. It’s tiresome to even list their many many major failures, but the app and PPE are two straightforward examples that could have been lifted from a political satire.
With time the people we vaunted as enlightened don’t appear to be doing well. In fact it seems they’re vulnerable and now subject to the same seasonal trends of spread everyone else was largely powerless against.
California, Germany, Korea, Japan...
We don’t consider whether the reaction has been worse than the virus, but that’s because there’s so much political reputation, ego, and identity staked on having been “level-headed” about all this.
Don't forget New York, where Emmy laureate Gov. Cuomo published his book on how he beat COVID-19 mere days before cases started exploding again in the second wave.
As you know if you’re Swedish, Expressen (a major newspaper here in Sweden) exploded these myths about the supposed demographic differences between Sweden and Norway by comparing the sparsely populated northern region of Sweden with its Nordic neighbors and it still had more than FIVE times the death rate.
The two countries are different, that was my point.
I'm not saying the Swedish approach is the most preferable, I'm saying cherry-picking Norway on some hand-wavy "all nordic countries are entirely alike wrt pandemics and you cannot compare them to other countries" manner is not scientific. And selecting one part of that country is not going to work unless you match on all important factors.
The rigorous way to do this is: form a list of parameters that affect the pandemic, and then match on a large pool of countries to compare outcomes. Calibrate your system. You can't just cherry pick either way. I can say - well, Sweden has similar pop densities to Germany, and Stockholm is denser than Berlin so Swedish should be worse. But that's not rigorous, it's just confirmation bias at work.
In truth, we'll only know the outcomes when the pandemic is over - probably by 2022 for most countries - and then it'll be an extended argument over whether it was worth say the economic damage, mental health consequences, etc. etc. for any actual reduction in excess deaths.
As someone who comes from the UK but has now lived in Sweden for 20 years and has relatives in both Sweden and Norway, the supposed demographic gulf between the two countries (which Swedish people seem to have only noticed this year) is certainly not apparent to me. But I wonder if it’s worth all the downvotes saying so?
It is definitely being used as an excuse. The whole country’s restrictions have been changed whilst the “new strain” is focused in London.
Regardless of the recent uptick in London, the rules needed to be changed, everyone knew it, Boris didn’t do it, and then to mask another U turn they seized on this.
Chris Witty said today the idea that the new strain is more contagious is “just a theory”.
It is being used as an excuse. But I wouldn't go as far as to think that means it isn't real. It's difficult to explain the numbers in Kent going up through lockdown and Tier 3 restrictions otherwise.
Apparently the new strain is not scary enough to enforce the travel ban in and out of London by law. At the moment the travel ban is advisory only. Make up your own mind.
I'm not convinced that enforcement particularly matters. When the government advises people to stay at home, most people modify their behaviour.
Fining people could arguably create a higher risk, as people would feel they had permission to break the ban if they accept a low risk of being caught and fined, and enforcement would involve more interaction between strangers.
Based on the wording by Boris Johnson the travel ban is advisory. He uses the word should and not must when referring to the travel ban: "People should not enter or leave tier 4 areas, and tier 4 residents must not stay overnight away from home"
Travel ban is advisory, overnight stay is banned by law.
Thanks for clarifying. I don't think that's the correct interpretation though. The government advice for tier 4 says:
> You must not leave or be outside of your home except for where you have a specific purpose, or a ‘reasonable excuse’
> If you live in a tier 4 area, you must stay at home. You must not leave your home to travel unless for work, education or other legally permitted reasons
So when Boris says "should" I believe he means "must unless you are in one of the excluded categories".
Isn't that single webcam image consistent with essential workers? The trucks are surely not banned; and it's understandable that people have to go home on a Friday night.
Planning to keep the reproduction rate as close to 1 as possible is the most efficient way to generate new strains, so they have the same root cause anyway.
I've heard it said that this mutation increases the replication rate by 0.4.
If we can keep this under control, we could have instead originally had a replication rate of 0.6 and the pandemic would be long over - with no mutated strain.
It has 17 mutated bases (is that a lot? or typical?) Of particular concern is the mutated spike protein which "may, in theory, result in the virus becoming more infectious and spreading more easily between people."
> Over time, as more mutations occur, the vaccine may need to be altered. This happens with seasonal flu, which mutates every year, and the vaccine is adjusted accordingly. The SARS-CoV-2 virus doesn’t mutate as quickly as the flu virus, and the vaccines that have so far proved effective in trials are types that can easily be tweaked if necessary.
I just want to confirm the quality of this source, as someone who is not actually a biologist but who has been following the scene carefully since the beginning. Dr Hodcroft is in the top tier of science communicators. This "new strain" story is basically tailor made for misinformation and poor information, as it has such a strong hook.
The tl;dr as I understand it is that there may be something there, but it is too early to tell for sure.
As has been pointed out in an earlier article about the "new strain"[1]:
"Let's not be hysterical. It doesn't mean it's more transmissible or more infectious or
dangerous."
That there are new strains of COVID-19 has been covered over, and over, and over, and over again on the This Week in Virology podcast[2] (which usually has 4 to 6 virologists on it every week discussing COVID-19 news), and they've always had the same message:
New strains naturally arise all the time as the virus mutates, but there is no evidence that these mutations make the virus more transmissible or infectious. Nor do they make the illness more severe nor otherwise affect clinical outcomes, nor make treatment any less effective.
People just love to talk up the discovery of new strains, thinking that coronavirus mutations are like flu mutations (which actually do require new vaccines every year), but they're not.
Coronavirus strains are kept an eye on by scientists for the purpose of tracking the spread and origin of the disease, and there'll always be one strain that will be more common than others, but it doesn't mean it's something we have to fear any more than any other strain.
That's old news, unfortunately. The latest data suggest that it is significantly more transmissible. "Up to" 70% more, according to the UK government's press conference. This is big.
Luckily, it doesn't seem to be more dangerous in terms of hospital admissions.
Maybe I’m too cynical, but it sounds like the new strain is an excuse to explain why the U.K. PM, who until a day ago was publicly not putting any restrictions on Britons, and especially Londoners for Christmas, is now suddenly reversing himself.
NERVTAG's early analysis suggests the new variant could increase R by 0.4 or greater. Although there is considerable uncertainty, it may be up to 70% more transmissible than the old variant.
Parroting NN Taleb: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Haven't we learned from coronavirus that we need to use the precautionary principle in the face of new information that is not fully understood. I don't know where you are from, but I locally heard a string of "there is no evidence of" starting in about January of 2019. There was no evidence that the virus would leave China (it did). No evidence that shutting down travel from infected areas would help (see Vietnam). No evidence of community transmission (it has happened in most of the globe). No evidence that masks help prevent transmission (appears to reduce transmission rates).
I am starting to think as soon as someone asserts "there is no evidence" for something related to the coronavirus, it is a foregone conclusion.
In any case, nobody can assert with absolute certainty that the coronavirus cannot mutate into a more severe or more transmissible virus, especially in the face of a the long human history of being (literally) plagued by mutating viruses.
A critical mutation is a possibility and we should be extremely cautious and vigilant against it. Even if we erroneously overreact 10 times to false mutations, the 11th time might be the one the matters. And the cost of those 11 overreactions will be much less than the cost of letting it go wild.
Parroting Christopher Hitchens: what is presented without proof can be dismissed without proof
Mutations that have a real impact on the RNA of the virus are incredibly rare. Most random mutations and errors replicating don't produce any meaningful change in the virus and you have to get very unlucky for a deadly mutation to happen.
We should stick to scientific rationalism even if it has limits. There has been too much opportunistic fear-mongering and questionable decision making playing advantage off the back of a natural virus.
This thing obeys the laws of physics, kills people in a particular pattern and can be managed with scientific tools we have had forever. There is simply no need for everybody to be hysterical yet again, when the science of the virus can be so easily spelled out for the masses.
But noo, we have to have a boogeyman to build a network of cultural changes. This particular mechanism of hijacking a natural disaster for control is embarrassingly transparent.
If I say there's gold buried at certain coordinates, that's also true independent of whether I prove it. The point is that the quote is a heuristic that works because most of the by the time you hear that claim, most of the statistical work has been done, hidden in the premise in a way that skips your intuitions a bit (the kolgomoroff comolexity of my phrase is a lot higher than yours, even though they're of about the same length, even though the number of bits needed to verify each is about the same).
>that's also true independent of whether I prove it.
This is so different from my point that I'm not sure how it relates.
I am confident there is literal treasure near to where I live, because I've seen very convincing evidence of dredging from multiple sources. In my mind, it is proven. But, I'm not acting on that because I don't find it worthwhile.
On the other hand, if a stranger told me there was a police traffic stop in a particular direction, I'd probably take a detour - even if there was a complete lack of proof.
Proof doesn't guide my action at all - I don't require a burden of proof in order to act.
Burden of proof is a legal concept, not a philosophical one.
You're acting based on your priors and new evidence. You have a high prior for police stops existing in general, and a low one for people randomly lying about it, so a stranger saying there's one that way is compelling evidence to you. You have a high prior on the existence of treausure nearvy, but a low one of the existence of treasure worth the effort of finding, so me telling you you could get rich quick isn't compelling evidence to you.
I'm saying you're taking as if it were some sort of ontological model or normative rule of discourse, when really it's a verbalisation of a heuristic you've already admitted to using. You're using something like 'burden of proof' as an algorithm, even if you consciously reject it as a verbal tool.
> But noo, we have to have a boogeyman to build a network of cultural changes. This particular mechanism of hijacking a natural disaster for control is embarrassingly transparent.
It might be a side-effect in many local politics right now (never let a good crisis to waste), and many of them act incompetent (or maybe they're always incompetent but now we see it clearer when they're in the spotlight), but I don't think that was the point GP was making. It also assumes a conspiracy of actors that want to change the world by "building a network of cultural changes..." (Occam's razor)
The 'conspiracy', i.e. the organised group, is the media coupled with a grassroots authoritarian ideology that pays it to keep reporting as 'pleases' it. Just lots of individuals and institutions acting according to their memes and incentives, no (non-obviously existing) cabal needed.
> can be managed with scientific tools we have had forever
The most important ones aren’t even particularly scientific. If you’re feeling ill, stay home. Wash your hands. Don’t hang around elderly or other vulnerable.
But these are simple and require no exceptional growth of state power and usurping of the right of free people to exercise their labor.
All these pro-labor types have no problem making scientists, politicians, etc. your effective boss.
Rich people deciding they must micromanage their doltish compatriots.
What you’re saying boils down to, we should assume that something will happen, and therefore act to deploy our limited resources to defend against this thing, just because it isn’t theoretically impossible.
Such an approach is guaranteed to massively fail and in doing so cost a lost of money and lives. It’s bad public policy because it is financially ruinous and leads to a greater number of deaths.
Here’s the logic: We know that resources (time, focus, money) can be wasted if they are spent on things that are not effective. We also know that resources are finite. There is only so much time, so much money, and so many different things that you can try to accomplish at once. Therefore, limited resources must be deployed efficiently — towards the most effective interventions — if we want them collectively to achieve the greatest effect.
This means dangers that are scientifically exceedingly unlikely to occur should perhaps not be entirely ignored but should not be driving major policy decisions.
The issue here is not an absence of evidence. There is an abundance of evidence that coronavirus mutations are fundamentally different from influenza mutations.
> I am starting to think as soon as someone asserts "there is no evidence" for something related to the coronavirus, it is a foregone conclusion.
I know that this is a joke, but it does rhetorically undercut your main point a bit. Hindsight is 2020 and resources are limited, if you let speculation without evidence rule the day you'll be drowning in potential problems, most of which will never materialize.
Nobody is saying "just ignore the new strains", they're saying "there is no reason to panic about new strains given the evidence", yes the evidence could change but that can be true of anything; you might wake up tomorrow to find out that new evidence suggests cell phone use increases risk of dementia, but there is no good reason to go around living your life like this might actually be true.
> In any case, nobody can assert with absolute certainty that the coronavirus cannot mutate into a more severe or more transmissible virus, especially in the face of a the long human history of being (literally) plagued by mutating viruses.
Well, the coronavirus won't mutate into Ebola, if that's what you're afraid of. And viri as deadly as Ebola aren't particularly successful as they tend to kill their host before spreading sufficiently (HIV is quite nefarious in that respect and I'd think close to worst case).
Humankind is in no danger of extinction from this virus or any other known. The old and infirm need to take precautions, as well as those tending to them. The rest of us have other things to worry about. Stop the fear mongering.
Re "there is no evidence": this is due to a mismatch between the medical profession's use of the words "no evidence" and everyone else's.
To a standard human, "no evidence" means "there is no evidence".
To a medical professional, "no evidence" means "there is insufficient evidence for us to be certain".
The clash of terminology is very unfortunate, and it prevents one from discussing probabilities at all. A statement from the WHO is either that something is "certain" or that there is "insufficient evidence at this time", even if there is sufficient evidence for one to conclude something with 80% probability.
Just a note on the precautionary principle: you can only apply it if you’re sure the action you’re taking does not cause harm. An example where this could be the case is enforced community mask wearing - it could introduce new vectors for transmission, for example.
While this is true generally, please bear in mind that the numbers in the UK do seem to be somewhat concerning. I don’t have actual values yet, but from the announcements from the various UK governments it seems to be the case that the case rate in London has almost tripled in the past 18 days, and 60% of current cases are this new strain.
The response in the UK has been pretty rapid and strict, and this has been justified by the governments on the basis of monitoring of this new strain. It’s unlikely (of course not impossible) that this decision would be taken without some decent evidence backing it up.
Indeed. And there is also the evidence from Kent (where it seems likely this new strain originated), where case numbers were increasing despite Tier 3 restrictions (all pubs and restaurants closed, etc)
We should acknowledge that this new strain is different [1] in some ways:
> The B.1.1.7 lineage carries a larger than usual number of virus genetic changes. The accrual of 14 lineage-specific amino acid replacements prior to its detection is, to date, unprecedented in the global virus genomic data for the COVID-19 pandemic. Most branches in the global phylogenetic tree of SARS-CoV-2 show no more than a few mutations and mutations accumulate at a relatively consistent rate over time.
It's certainly still not proven that it's definitely more infectious than the other strains. But it's a bit of a stretch to infer from previous experience here, given the quantitative difference.
yes, obviously things mutate, but all your other information in this comment is out of date - the current information is the strain they're talking about is 70% more infectious.
Apropos of other comments. What do we think about the mask “issue”? Some people vehemently refuse to wear them, others take “just go with flow” attitude, yet others approach it with outsized religious zeal, hounding the heretics or at least giving them the stink eye. It also seems some people take great comfort on the mask, wearing it even inside their cars or waaay out in the open.
Are we witnessing a religious schism in the making? Is it with us to stay, post-covid?
The mask issue is a non issue. There are a few possibilities:
1) Masks work in preventing the spread of the virus.
2) Masks don’t work in preventing the spread of the virus.
If we don’t wear masks, then:
under (1) we have hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of sickness instances, and hundreds of billions of lost dollars due to reduced economic activity and sickness, compared to the wearing mask scenario.
(2) There’s very little difference. Some may say we unnecessarily spend money on masks, but considering that the making of masks can employ otherwise unused resources, especially in the clothing manufacturing and distribution economy, it may actually be a positive to make and distribute masks even if they don’t work, comparable to a stimulus, but more effective because all of the money is immediately deployed, and not just saved, and there are far fewer ideological issues with giving money away for nothing, and it does not require any deficit spending. Further, even if masks don’t help with COVID, they will help reduce chances of spreading other diseases and therefore reduce the strain on hospitals.
Now if you further consider that there is a lot of evidence to indicate that masks do have an effect, and the countries that have handled COVID best by and large swear by them, it’s an absolute no brained to mandate them.
> It also seems some people take great comfort on the mask, wearing it even inside their cars or waaay out in the open.
Initially, in March, I had similar thoughts - in my case it's currently like this:
- with the temperature being 0-5 Celsius throughout the day the mask keeps my face a bit warmer than when not wearing it. I do like it in this context :)
- as I have to get off&on the bus and 2 trains, I just keep it on all the time while commuting. The recommendations are not to touch the mask's external surface (and not to indirectly get in contact with it), keeping it on all the time seems to be the least dangerous option.
- wearing glasses while wearing as well a mask can be very challenging (fogging); once I finally manage to make everything work (dozens of tiny adjustments) I "freeze" my setup and keep it like that until I know that I won't need the mask anymore.
Therefore, nothing extreme going on if you see me driving or walking alone with the mask on - just being practical :)
There is still no evidence showing that mask usage reduces spread. Worse, people think that mask usage entails fail-safe protection. Like condoms against pregnancy. I know of IT-companies that enforces mask usage in their offices but still does not allow employees to work from home.
This is false. There’s a lot of evidence that mask usage reduces spread.
The evidence ranges from the fact that masks almost certainly capture water droplets which are supposed to be major carriers of the virus to the fact that there is correlation between countries that wear masks having reduced spreads compare to ones that don’t. In fact, a recent study compared districts in the same state, grouping them by whether the district implemented mask mandates or not, and found that the ones that had mask mandates had significantly lower levels of COVID hospitalizations vs the ones that didn’t.
There’s a LOT of evidence that masks reduce COVID spread. What there isn’t, is conclusive evidence that lets us say with a 95% degree of probability that masks work. Or carefully designed scientific studies that prove this.
But evidence doesn’t just mean a double blind scientific study, and if we waited for that degree of confidence to make decisions in everyday life, or even in very significant arenas like business and politics, we would be making no decisions at all. The entire IT industry, a massive trillions of dollar industry, for example, has switched from waterfall to agile development on the basis of far less and weaker evidence that agile works better than waterfall than we have for whether or not masks work.
> evidence ranges from the fact that masks almost certainly capture water droplets
That’s not evidence, that’s a hypothesis. And in its current form it can be empirically disproved:
Some masks allow droplets through and others don’t. Most people have no idea which one they are wearing. https://youtu.be/Py6SCZHAUgQ
Of those which don’t allow passage, many will simply redirect the exhaled air from going forward to going sideways with same number of droplets left in the air. For example a surgical mask does just that - my glasses fog up at every exhale.
> There’s a LOT of evidence that masks reduce COVID spread. What there isn’t, is conclusive evidence that lets us say with a 95% degree of probability that masks work. Or carefully designed scientific studies that prove this.
Well, if we take the view that evidence doesn't require scientific studies then it is just your bullshit vs my bullshit. You say different levels of Covid hospitalizations in districts with mask mandates vs districts without. I say confounding factors. I say the U.S. has high levels of mask use yet still high levels of Covid spread. You say confounding factors. Etc.
The entire IT industry is a great example because there is a massive amount of bullshit, cargo culture, and magic silver bullets that doesn't really work in it.
Let's summarize some basic realities quickly to give a picture of why lockdown was largely a farce as anything but a short-term harm reduction measure. For those of you here (I assume a slight majority at least) who live in bubbles of white collar work conditions that can easily be done remotely from within highly developed countries with fairly developed social support infrastructure and the means to amp it up for extended periods of time: The vast majority of the rest of the world is not like your bubble. Despite massive improvements in human standards of living during the last several decades, the majority of the world population in the majority of the world's countries lives in such a way that their absolutely essential daily economic needs can only be serviced by daily close interaction with dozens or hundreds of other people in urban situations. For the developing world this is a nearly universal need and even for the developed world, huge parts of the population have to do the same thing and there's simply no way for them to avoid it. Covid will spread among them no matter what kind of extreme measures a small privileged subset of the population smugly pushes for, and from there it will by one means or another filter its way upwards even to those who can indeed isolate without major immediate economic problems. So, unless a small fraction of the world that can entirely work remotely is somehow capable of completely cutting itself away from contact with the rest of the world of people who emphatically can't do this same thing, the pandemic will run its contagious course regardless of the measures taken haphazardly in one jurisdiction or another. This applies at both the global macro scale and the local scale, and unless you want to advocate an absurdly unrealistic level of social atomization continuing indefinitely with complete disregard for very real, very serious economic consequences, it's something that simply won't happen.
It’s unconscionable that someone is allowed to p into a liquor store with a limit on the number of patrons at a time, buy a quick bottle, with minimal human interaction and easily maintained social distancing and be out within minutes, but they are not allowed to enter a building with hundreds of people at the same time, sit for hours, singing and talking to each other.
In Seattle. I was very impressed once the mask mandate was out how many people complied. Sure there were some people protesting “are you sheep?” but 99% complied.
Honestly Costco and Fred Meyers + others really Amped up the game. You can’t enter if you don’t have a mask. Fred Meyers were nice enough to give you a mask if you don’t have one for free. You’d have to really be a rebel not to wear a mask. There are quite a few rebels here and there but strict enforcement by supermarkets really worked.
If the police were enforcing this I bet a few African American folks would have been shot over not wearing masks. The cops here just go crazy mode for the smallest thing.
It's not just in the UK. The new (currently termed) 501.V2 strain is rampant here in South Africa as well. So far it is spreading really fast, and especially among younger people (with no co-morbidities) who are becoming critically sick.
We've had a pretty authoritarian year of lockdowns and tough regulations, so now compliance is way down all over the board.
Some parts of the coastline has been totally closed, but since it's now our major vacation people are just swarming malls and other locations.
I'm expecting a pretty big outbreak again, possibly either matching or eclipsing our previous growth that we had at the start of June.
It’s entirely possible for a mutation to make the virus more deadly and more contagious at the same time, exploit a window of opportunity in an unprepared population, then “burn out.”
Absent any special considerations, that's the general direction that pathogens go, more infectious and less deadly. Dead hosts aren't a benefit to the virus, and neither are hosts too sick to go out and infect others. Evolution is messy though, I don't know how likely a particular new strain is to go that direction.
Well, if the "aim" of the virus (what is ours, btw?) is to replicate as much as possible, the best "strategy" would be to be highly contagious and remain dormant for as long as possible; fatality would be an obstacle rather than advantage. There is just one problem with this approach: as far as we can tell viruses aren't intelligent and they don't think.
On the other hand, if you consider the possibility that viruses might be a tool used by someone else (God, aliens, evil scientists hired by bad governments), fatality becomes an important, if not the defining aspect of the tool.
I think it's important to remember that viral mutations are random. Therefore to a large extent there is no purpose. What there is are traits that make a given mutated version of the virus more likely to spread and thus come to our attention.
They don’t think and they don’t control their mutations but selection acts on them and “chooses” the strains that reproduce more. Pathogens become less deadly with subsequent generations because those strains which kill the host quickly limit their spread. It’s not impossible for them to become more deadly but it is unlikely due to the fitness cost.
Hmm, you've got a point, but what kind of "obese" are we talking? Usually people conflate obese with overweight.
Being (slightly) overweight is generally good for health, especially when combating a virus.
200+ years ago the vast majority of people were definitely starved for nutrients, living off whatever they could get locally, with very little meat compared to today.
> "You mean the natural selection of hosts, not viruses",
No, just simply 'natural selection', as the overall process that determines which entities get to reproduce.
Natural selection for the hosts is about their chances for reproducing (before dying from the disease). And in this case, we don't care about that since its a fair assumption that the patient is not having sex in ICU. :)
Natural selection for viruses is about having the opportunity to jump hosts and replicate more viruses. The longer the host lives the higher the chances for the virus to propagate.
It's not. There are genetic changes, including to the spike protein that it uses to attack.
> The new variant has mutations to the spike protein that the three leading vaccines are targeting. However, vaccines produce antibodies against many regions in the spike protein, so it’s unlikely that a single change would make the vaccine less effective.
You know it must be serious because Boris has been extremely resistant to imposing restrictions this entire time, and he knows how much people were looking forward to their Christmas. Apparantly it's around 70% more infectious, although I'm not sure how that's calculated.
I guess we all just have to hope this doesn't affect the efficacy of the vaccines. Apparently the spike protein is affected, although it sounds like the changes are relatively small and thus they're hoping it doesn't make any difference.
no it hasn't, it's kept him doing what he always does, wandering from tactical decision to tactical decision. the March lockdown only happened when public pressure became unbearable, he allowed the treasury to subsidise people eating in restaurants, he continues, in month nine, to hand large contracts to unqualified mates, both wasting money and reducing the ability to deal with the pandemic, and despite it being a once-in-a-century pandemic, did not ask for an extension on the disorganised negotiations with the EU, meaning that in the middle of December, it's still unclear how trade with EU, including...food and medicine, is meant to work in 12 days.
his entire career is just making the easy choice in the moment with no forethought.
He thought it was however perfectly humane to cancel all of the other religious holidays, and though that doesn't speak to his bumbling act, it speaks volumes about his character.
Christmas is a key Christian festival, and the UK is a Christian country, with the monarch as the head of its official church. So perhaps no surprises if it gets special treatment.
I'm of two minds about this particular decision - Johnson is a crook and a fraud, but in this case I can't really blame him for making the decision (Our late decision to go into lockdown killed people, though).
I don't get why people have to personalise this. Johnson's decision is easy, go with the expertise or ignore it and make something up. Things for some reason seem now always to have to be presented as the policy of one political "team" as if a country can be run by relying entirely on a small group of politicians to come up with all the ideas.
We should be using statisticians, virologists, public health advisors, doctors, etc., to come up with suggestions. Maybe a few separate groups. Johnson's decision then is "shall I try and circumvent this expert advice or not".
Seems like politicians have no idea how to delegate, and press are so poor at reporting they can't somehow cope with presenting things that aren't personality competitions.
The best thing Johnson could do is sanction his advisors and make sure of the rule of law in their regard - he's used his father as a personal representative in governmental actions, but his father has been publicly and openly breaching the rules. Who could possibly honour "Johnson's" advice when he won't even hold his own personnel to that standard. It's beyond ridiculous and shows utter contempt for the British public IMO.
I don't think anything much has changed wrt a strategy. The main pointer here is the allowance in the strictest tier for group worship, and allowing Christmas grottos to stay open- not exactly science led.
- Both of the "full lockdowns" were implemented at least 2 weeks later than experts were calling for. Which is why they had to go on for so long.
- Between the two lockdowns people actively encouraged to go out to restaurants with the "Eat out to help out" scheme even though anyone with half a brain could have told you that this would lead to a sharp increase in cases.
- London was opened as Tier 2 even though it had as many cases as other parts of the country and should have been Tier 3 if the rules were being applied consistently.
Last I checked it’s pretty hard to be an expert on something that’s only been around a year. Also, experts don’t dictate government policy, and as much as I dislike government policy, if they did I’m sure we’d be in a much worse position.
The international reaction to COVID-19 is hugely irrational and the cost far outweighs the advantages of this approach.
We’re ‘saving’ the lives of the elderly by giving them absolutely nothing to live for.
I agree; I'm not somebody who would have voted for him, but he's had some really tough decisions to make, and whether or not he's made the right call or dragged his heels at times, he's clearly been prepared to upend his own ideological leanings when needed and I respect him and the government for that.
I am baffled that somebody could observe the actions of the UK government and come to this conclusion. They seem to have been determined to do the worst possible thing to the very last moment, then abruptly about-face when that position was unsustainable.
I would suggest taking your own advice here and reading the comment that you are replying to.
I am baffled that anybody could observe what has happened and come to the conclusion that the prime minister has “clearly been prepared to upend his own ideological leanings”, because it has to me been clearly demonstrated that the prime minister and government will push forward with policies in line with their “ideological leanings”, even though they are likely harmful, until the very last moment when they are forced by circumstance to change direction.
Your new response includes the argument I pointed out was missing; rereading your original comment can hardly be expected to anticipate future fundamental additions...
> “There is no current evidence to suggest the new strain causes a higher mortality rate or that it affects vaccines and treatments, although urgent work is underway to confirm this,” [England’s Chief Medical Officer] Whitty said.
That evidence would presumably come in the form of vaccinated patients developing infections from the new strain. Given that both the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines appear to have a window of about one month before full effect, it could be some time before the hypothesis can be tested.
Do we have any reason at all to trust that any of the vaccines currently being rolled out deal with this new strain? There was surely no way to include testing for this in any of the trials. Doesn't this at least raise the spectre that the vaccines will all be for not and we'll still be faced with all the same issues that already exist.
The UK government has stated that there is no evidence the vaccine will not be effective against this strain. And from the bmj:
The new variant has mutations to the spike protein that the three leading vaccines are targeting. However, vaccines produce antibodies against many regions in the spike protein, so it’s unlikely that a single change would make the vaccine less effective.
Over time, as more mutations occur, the vaccine may need to be altered. This happens with seasonal flu, which mutates every year, and the vaccine is adjusted accordingly. The SARS-CoV-2 virus doesn’t mutate as quickly as the flu virus, and the vaccines that have so far proved effective in trials are types that can easily be tweaked if necessary.
Peacock said, “With this variant there is no evidence that it will evade the vaccination or a human immune response. But if there is an instance of vaccine failure or reinfection then that case should be treated as high priority for genetic sequencing.”
That's not very reassuring, why is the new strain causing any problems at all if it behaves exactly like the existing strain? And if they haven't actually done any trials or testing, then they haven't really looked for any evidence. If they haven't looked for any, it seems rather too convenient to use the lack of evidence as a reason for hope that the current crop of vaccines provides any protection at all.
It behaves exactly the same, but faster (is the current working assumption based on limited research so far).
So the "problems" it is causing is just that EITHER more stringent restrictions of the same kind are required to contain it OR if uncontained healthcare will be overwhelmed more quickly.
> why is the new strain causing any problems at all if it behaves exactly like the existing strain?
If it's true that the new strain is 70% more transmissible then that means more people will get sick before we can reach immunity thanks to a vaccine, hospitals will be overwhelmed sooner and more people will die.
While that's true, the issue being addressed is if the current vaccines would help at all even if we could deploy them instantly. It honestly seems like an open question, although apparently people are hopeful it'll work out that way.
> Without countermeasures a virus looses lethality over time, these countermeasures select for virus strains which transmit even under extreme counter measures easily.
How do you explain smallpox, which has remained highly lethal for a very long time, during much of which we didn't really have countermeasures available?
The naive explanation is that its mutation rate is low.
Also the evolving to be less lethal is very much a shorthand, and my impression is that it is a description made specifically to influenza, though it’s not entirely limited to that virus.
Yes it was meant as shorthand, also I'm not an expert, but I worry that applying evolutionary pressure on the virus in the way it is done right now might actually produce undesirable results.
If a virus remains transmissible after its host’s death that reduces the disadvantage of killing the host. It was also highly infectious through shed skin that could be carried long distances without the host.
Here is a good summary of what experts (which I am not) think: https://www.asbmb.org/asbmb-today/science/112920/will-the-co.... Regarding the smallpox virus (as per the article): It is a very durable virus, compared to a flu like virus, that means it will have a different reproductive strategy.
2 cases in particular stand out to me:
Compliance with mask wearing on TFL is less than 50%. "Covid enforcement" officers walk around about one train in 50, and despite it being 8 months since this started, "I don't have one" is an acceptable answer to why you're not wearing a mask.
Supermarkets continue to be rammed, but staff aren't required to wear masks. Nor are they enforcing the requirement on customers beyond the door. One staff member with covid will rapidly infect a few 1000 people given how busy they are on a Saturday morning. Wtf aren't staff required to wear masks?
The attitude here is rapidly becoming "why should I bother if no one else is?". And frankly, I think the government know and encourage this. Its all but policy. Time and again we see them decline scientific advice, then act surprised when infection rates spike.
I'm especially frustrated as my best friend lives in Melbourne. Despite lockdown starting at basically the same time, and some crazy bad luck/incidents, Melbourne is back to BAU.