The message that is still not being clearly articulated is that the mitigations that have worked may no longer work under B.1.1.7 and B.1.351. Our mitigations until now have been based on the Wuhan and Lombardy data; now we have no clue what will happen.
We've been like "well, we know that works, & we'd do it if only it was easier"
Now we're at "what the hell is going to happen here" with London looking like this despite lockdowns 📈
It feels like the level of understanding in the U.S. ground to a halt with these memes from the Spring. The 50% difference in transmissibility may mean masks went from "evidently doing something" to "and i oop, exponential growth." We really don't know, & we oddly don't care
The NHS is activating field hospitals as London hospitals blow past capacity. Some of this is similar seasonality to what we're experiencing in the U.S., but more of it may be the result of B.1.1.7. If this doesn't wake us up, I don't know what can. reuters.com/article/uk-hea…
Following Scotland, England looks to be heading towards a Tier 5 & national lockdown. It’s impossible to imagine a true Wuhan-style hard lockdown, and over the next few weeks, the world will learn what that failure will mean. This is a turning point of the pandemic, for the worse
We have light at the end of the tunnel, but we are by no means out of the woods. This is already the most painful winter of our lives, and it will grow worse through the Spring. We knew a rough winter was ahead, but the dynamics are different now. We’re running out of options.
Uh oh: “The most important site is E484, where neutralization by some sera is reduced >10-fold by several mutations, including one in emerging viral lineages in South Africa and Brazil.”
The South African variant has both E484K and N501Y, so the concerns from the last few weeks are more justified now. What will the combination of the higher viral loads associated with N501Y — if that holds — mean when neutralization dips because of E484K escape? Not liking this.
We’re already seeing that experiment play out in South Africa. We’ll know more about vaccine efficacy soon, but I imagine the first immune escape alarm would be a rise in re-infections among those exposed to prior lineages. We shouldn’t wait around for that data...
The underlying tone of this is irresponsible. This is not journalism; this is a collection of anecdotes with a preconceived narrative. nymag.com/intelligencer/…
That Quibi screenplay really cherry picks details, like the leaked Hubei CDC reports that suggest the first epidemic may not have occurred in Wuhan after all. The Yichang or Xianning 'influenza' epidemics could have been wrongfully attributed cnn.com/2020/11/30/asi…
At the end of the day, so much of this easily weaponized mystique results directly from the Communist Party's narrative, cover up, and censorship. This is a story about the Chinese system, not about a virology lab and gain functions.
“My concern, as a virologist, is that if you wanted to make a vaccine-resistant strain, what you would do is to build a cohort of partially immunized individuals in the teeth of a highly prevalent viral infection” statnews.com/2021/01/04/bri…
These are certainly not the only perspectives. Many are also arguing that we're already in a massive immune escape experiment, with immune responses waning and new mutations like E484K displaying dominance and mAbs escape potential.
This type of coordinated behavior was quickly substantiated following Christchurch. I haven't seen much evidence of that here. If Discord edgelords are a 'dark web' 'coordinated attack' than TikTok might not be equipped to combat the PRC actors.
I don't expect every platform to succeed against this type of thing, but ByteDance literally prepared for this exact scenario — and they simply failed. Maybe they should own up to that instead of describing it like organized cybercrime and nation states.
"We learned that groups operating on the dark web made plans to raid social media platforms, including TikTok, in order to spread the video across the internet" theguardian.com/technology/202…