10 ms·

I think most people seem to be underestimating just how bad this is. During the recent 4-week lockdown it was already clear that something odd was going on in K

by gns24 6y ago

I think most people seem to be underestimating just how bad this is. During the recent 4-week lockdown it was already clear that something odd was going on in Kent; whilst case counts were dropping in the rest of the country, they continued to rise significantly there. Something was clearly different. Now high case counts are spreading from the South East into the rest of the country. We don't know whether we can even stop the growth. During the last lockdown schools remained open; I suspect that it may be necessary to close them in order to just stop the growth. A significant reduction in cases looks impossible. This strain has probably already spread to tens of other countries. Every country which is just about holding things together, whatever their strategy, is going to struggle with a significantly more transmissible variant of the virus.

kashprime 6y ago
It's fortunate that Pfizer/BioNTech chose the whole spike protein mRNA as their vaccine candidate over the one that focused just on the receptor binding domain -- which the UK mutation changed. Wise choice, and hopefully it will work well against this new variant. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2027906 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2027906 Moderna's vaccine was focused on the whole spike protein too. So even though there are crucial mutations in this mutation, both leading vaccine candidates hopefully will still be effective.
stubbedtoe 6y ago
For those interested in looking at the raw data, https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/interactive-map https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/interactive-map is a useful visualisation of cases by region, over time.
LatteLazy 6y ago
I don't disagree, but it would be really nice if we could classify lockdowns better. The original lockdown furloughed a LOT of workers, closed schools and closed virtually all shops. Today's "super tier 4+ lockdown" doesn't seem to apply to shops at all (my local shops were all open this morning, is wrapping paper really an "essential"?). Workers are mostly going in. Schools that have remained open unless they already closed and childcare is still running. They've basically just shut restaurants. That's the only change I can see... I've posted elsewhere that my cynical view of the UK gov approach is that they are talking tough and doing nothing. So maybe I'm biased? Perhaps a move transmissible strain will force real action?
- lol768 6y ago
  > I've posted elsewhere that my cynical view of the UK gov approach is that they are talking tough and doing nothing. So maybe I'm biased? It's felt like this with all of the tiers to be honest. They just don't go far enough and the populace is fed up with taking much heed of the rules too. The November "lockdown" felt very, very different to March when the roads etc were quiet - and it actually felt like people were taking this seriously.
  - LatteLazy 6y ago
    I have to be careful I don't wander into conspiracy theories but... I'm fed up because so many people flout the rules with no consequences. I suspect that the lack of consequences is intentional. If everyone flours the rules, the economic hit will be smaller and Bojo can claim he did something and its not his fault no one listened. The government have created a situation where the only logical action for normal people is business as usual, that means large excess deaths, and the government has plausible deniability. Whoops. /RantAndParanoia
    - iso1631 6y ago
      > I'm fed up because so many people flout the rules with no consequences. Been that way since Barnard's Castle. The latest decision that says MPs can see their siblings for Christmas Dinner on the 25th, but a Nurse working on the 25th can't see their parent with terminal cancer for dinner on the 26th, will hopefully be ignored.
      - londons_explore 6y ago
        What's especially funny is the latest Tier 4 Health Protection legislation has a specific exception for groups meeting in the grounds of castles... I can't believe it hasn't made headlines yet...
        switch007 6y ago
        I think it’s existed longer? I remember reading some legislation during the November lockdown thinking that the Gov is trolling us.
fsh 6y ago
Without proper statistical analysis and epidemiological modelling this is nothing more than an anecdote. The last twelve months should really have taught us not to trust those.
oliwarner 6y ago
It was only a lockdown in name. Schools were in. Shops were open. Ministers have even been supplying pubs with methods to skirt the rules (scotch eggs ffs). Not saying it's not bad, just that very little is actually being done to prevent the spread. Govt care more about keeping people in work.
- iso1631 6y ago
  Yet it worked well. In Cheshire (not badly hit), daily cases halved between the start of lockdown and end, having doubled in the previous month. In Cumbria it was even more of a drop Overnight covid paitents in the NW went from a peak above that of April in Mid November (i.e. had caught it in October), dropping to 70% of the peak a month later, same in NE+Yorks.
  - oliwarner 6y ago
    The efficacy of action is directly related to your starting density. That is to say a mild lockdown is effective on a sparse caseload. But there were places where one in a hundred was a contagious carrier. Stay at home was the only thing that would worked well. They're still not at that point, plans are still to return schools in T4 and as others testify, most shops ignore the rules. It's shambolic.
hammock 6y ago
>During the recent 4-week lockdown it was already clear that something odd was going on in Kent; whilst case counts were dropping in the rest of the country, they continued to rise significantly there. Something was clearly different. They said the same thing about overnight vote counts in Fulton County, GA... turns out it was nothing.
numpad0 6y ago
I think what most people has is issues with resolving double binds; there’s only one way out and it’s hard lockdown with rationing, which kind of require willful sacrifices, of jobs to say super least. The general public anywhere isn’t ready for trolley problems even if told to optimize for least body counts. Basically the whole free world is in disbelief of the story that there are people on tracks(except TW/AU/NZ?).
lbeltrame 6y ago
> I think most people seem to be underestimating just how bad this is. No, there is no reason to panic yet. Concern, perhaps, but not panic. There are a truckload of confounding factors in the middle, including potential "founder effects" (when a variant becomes dominant because it is the first to take hold, and just outruns the others out of larger starting numbers). There is not yet solid proof of "70% more transmissible" given that all the data there are is the SAGE meeting minutes. We don't know from where the data came from, and how the estimations were made. There are huge uncertainties. Until the biological analyses are done, one needs to keep their cool. Sadly, that wasn't what the UK government did.
- gns24 6y ago
  Founder effects don't explain why this new strain took over as the dominant strain in London. Even if we suppose the chance of it being as bad as suggested is only 50%, we should panic now, rather than waiting until we have solid proof and risk having a public health disaster. Personally I suspect the UK didn't panic in its announcement and that this situation had been under surveillance for some weeks.
  - lbeltrame 6y ago
    The confidence intervals go as low as 37% and as high as ~120%. That's a load of uncertainty. Also the latest document by PHE highlights also the limitations of the current data behind modeling (PCR negative for the S gene, but positive for the others). At this point the good questions haven't been answered yet.
Shorel 6y ago
>During the last lockdown schools remained open Honestly, that doesn't sound like a real lockdown at all.
- ryandrake 6y ago
  People really need to stop using the l-word. It grossly overstates what's happening. They called it that here in the USA too, and it was just as ridiculous. We had these so-called Stay At Home orders, which had tons of exceptions and were both ignored by the population and unenforced by the government. They might as well have been called Stay At Home Suggestions. An actual sustained lock-down would likely stop the virus's spread, allowing us to finally get back to normal. But nobody wants to claim ownership of the economic fallout, so instead they do these half-assed lock-downs which don't really accomplish much besides making the government look like they're doing something.
hnarn 6y ago
This comment should be flagged, it’s extremely sensationalist and below what I expect from HN. 1. On what basis do you say that people are underestimating the seriousness? Are you a doctor? An epidemiologist? Do you have any medical education? 2. Do you have any supporting evidence for your claim that it’s obvious that something was “off” about Kent and that there is a spread attributable to this? Or are you just drawing lines between dots? You source nothing, so it’s impossible to know. 3. On what basis do you claim that this strain “probably” has spread to tens of other countries? Who are you, and based on what do you make this guess? The pandemic is taxing enough on everybody as it is. We DO NOT need “educated guesses” from armchair epidemiologists that do not identify themselves or what sources they are drawing their conclusions from — and I could expect as much from a random comment field on the internet, but not as the top voted comment on HN.
- gns24 6y ago
  1. No, I don't have any relevant qualifications. But it's not the epidemiologists who I think are underestimating the seriousness - what's surprising me is that everyone else is largely ignoring this. I think people think 70% is not a big amount, rather than the difference between slight decrease and rapid exponential growth. Clearly a lot of foreign governments do think it's serious given the travel plans they have put in place. 2. I spend an unhealthy amount of time looking at data. Before this incident there were always random peaks which got explained by outbreaks at abattoirs or freshers' week, and national movements, but this change stood out. Week after week it kept behaving differently. My partner and I had already speculated about the change possibly being down to a mutation, since although that seemed incredibly unlikely nothing else explained what we were seeing, but dismissed that idea since obviously the authorities would have noticed. It turned out they had noticed, they just hadn't announced it. 3. A quick calculation: recent infection surveys suggest about 1% of people in the UK have the virus. The new strain makes up about 10%, so 1 in 1000 people have the new strain. In November 2020 from Heathrow alone, 240k people travelled to the EU, 68k to other European countries, 63k to Africa and 82k to North America. If I remember correctly cases have already been found in Denmark and Australia. Denmark does more sequencing than most countries (I don't have a good source for that, but there by-country filters here imply it: https://nextstrain.org/groups/neherlab/ncov/united-kingdom?c=gt-S_501,69&dmin=2020-11-19&f_country=United%20Kingdom&fbclid=IwAR3kseCZPD6aF3SEBSLRT0zMiz7mb8t4G_lV59Ddo8MmW2gqq_ul8U8DNPw&l=unrooted&p=grid https://nextstrain.org/groups/neherlab/ncov/united-kingdom?c... ) Based on this I'd argue that it's more likely than not to already be in tens of other countries. I'd certainly be interested to hear arguments to the contrary. But I don't believe it's sensationalist to suggest this - at this point I'd consider it a miracle if it hasn't spread too far. I hope I'm wrong.
saberdancer 6y ago
I am not from UK but I think this is an important and critical information. How is the daily deaths chart in Kent and London? Deaths will be visible later on than infections but by now there should be a visible effect if IFR/CFR is different. If there is no visible difference it's possible that R0 increased while IFR remains steady (which is bad enough).
dehrmann 6y ago
> We don't know whether we can even stop the growth I think extreme lockdown measures could, but they'd almost have to be indefinite, and there's no appetite for that.
jnxx 6y ago
> This strain has probably already spread to tens of other countries. Every country which is just about holding things together, whatever their strategy, is going to struggle with a significantly more transmissible variant of the virus. Yes. If the new variant is duplicating every week even under medium lock-down measures, as it appears, it will be very difficult to contain it, and impossible with the current set of measures. It would require a very strict lock-down at least. And the vaccinenes would not yet help - they will help later but probably not before late Summer, while the new variant will very likely be all over Europe until March. Thinking about what we know, what appears very likely, and the conclusions of it, the first half of the year will be far away from normal, even catastrophic.

by gns24 6y ago

kashprime 6y ago

It's fortunate that Pfizer/BioNTech chose the whole spike protein mRNA as their vaccine candidate over the one that focused just on the receptor binding domain -- which the UK mutation changed. Wise choice, and hopefully it will work well against this new variant. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2027906 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2027906 Moderna's vaccine was focused on the whole spike protein too. So even though there are crucial mutations in this mutation, both leading vaccine candidates hopefully will still be effective.

stubbedtoe 6y ago

For those interested in looking at the raw data, https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/interactive-map https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/interactive-map is a useful visualisation of cases by region, over time.

LatteLazy 6y ago

I don't disagree, but it would be really nice if we could classify lockdowns better. The original lockdown furloughed a LOT of workers, closed schools and closed virtually all shops. Today's "super tier 4+ lockdown" doesn't seem to apply to shops at all (my local shops were all open this morning, is wrapping paper really an "essential"?). Workers are mostly going in. Schools that have remained open unless they already closed and childcare is still running. They've basically just shut restaurants. That's the only change I can see... I've posted elsewhere that my cynical view of the UK gov approach is that they are talking tough and doing nothing. So maybe I'm biased? Perhaps a move transmissible strain will force real action?

lol768 6y ago
> I've posted elsewhere that my cynical view of the UK gov approach is that they are talking tough and doing nothing. So maybe I'm biased? It's felt like this with all of the tiers to be honest. They just don't go far enough and the populace is fed up with taking much heed of the rules too. The November "lockdown" felt very, very different to March when the roads etc were quiet - and it actually felt like people were taking this seriously.
- LatteLazy 6y ago
  I have to be careful I don't wander into conspiracy theories but... I'm fed up because so many people flout the rules with no consequences. I suspect that the lack of consequences is intentional. If everyone flours the rules, the economic hit will be smaller and Bojo can claim he did something and its not his fault no one listened. The government have created a situation where the only logical action for normal people is business as usual, that means large excess deaths, and the government has plausible deniability. Whoops. /RantAndParanoia
  - iso1631 6y ago
    > I'm fed up because so many people flout the rules with no consequences. Been that way since Barnard's Castle. The latest decision that says MPs can see their siblings for Christmas Dinner on the 25th, but a Nurse working on the 25th can't see their parent with terminal cancer for dinner on the 26th, will hopefully be ignored.
    - londons_explore 6y ago
      What's especially funny is the latest Tier 4 Health Protection legislation has a specific exception for groups meeting in the grounds of castles... I can't believe it hasn't made headlines yet...
      - switch007 6y ago
        I think it’s existed longer? I remember reading some legislation during the November lockdown thinking that the Gov is trolling us.

fsh 6y ago

Without proper statistical analysis and epidemiological modelling this is nothing more than an anecdote. The last twelve months should really have taught us not to trust those.

oliwarner 6y ago

It was only a lockdown in name. Schools were in. Shops were open. Ministers have even been supplying pubs with methods to skirt the rules (scotch eggs ffs). Not saying it's not bad, just that very little is actually being done to prevent the spread. Govt care more about keeping people in work.

iso1631 6y ago
Yet it worked well. In Cheshire (not badly hit), daily cases halved between the start of lockdown and end, having doubled in the previous month. In Cumbria it was even more of a drop Overnight covid paitents in the NW went from a peak above that of April in Mid November (i.e. had caught it in October), dropping to 70% of the peak a month later, same in NE+Yorks.
- oliwarner 6y ago
  The efficacy of action is directly related to your starting density. That is to say a mild lockdown is effective on a sparse caseload. But there were places where one in a hundred was a contagious carrier. Stay at home was the only thing that would worked well. They're still not at that point, plans are still to return schools in T4 and as others testify, most shops ignore the rules. It's shambolic.

hammock 6y ago

>During the recent 4-week lockdown it was already clear that something odd was going on in Kent; whilst case counts were dropping in the rest of the country, they continued to rise significantly there. Something was clearly different. They said the same thing about overnight vote counts in Fulton County, GA... turns out it was nothing.

numpad0 6y ago

I think what most people has is issues with resolving double binds; there’s only one way out and it’s hard lockdown with rationing, which kind of require willful sacrifices, of jobs to say super least. The general public anywhere isn’t ready for trolley problems even if told to optimize for least body counts. Basically the whole free world is in disbelief of the story that there are people on tracks(except TW/AU/NZ?).

lbeltrame 6y ago

> I think most people seem to be underestimating just how bad this is. No, there is no reason to panic yet. Concern, perhaps, but not panic. There are a truckload of confounding factors in the middle, including potential "founder effects" (when a variant becomes dominant because it is the first to take hold, and just outruns the others out of larger starting numbers). There is not yet solid proof of "70% more transmissible" given that all the data there are is the SAGE meeting minutes. We don't know from where the data came from, and how the estimations were made. There are huge uncertainties. Until the biological analyses are done, one needs to keep their cool. Sadly, that wasn't what the UK government did.

gns24 6y ago
Founder effects don't explain why this new strain took over as the dominant strain in London. Even if we suppose the chance of it being as bad as suggested is only 50%, we should panic now, rather than waiting until we have solid proof and risk having a public health disaster. Personally I suspect the UK didn't panic in its announcement and that this situation had been under surveillance for some weeks.
- lbeltrame 6y ago
  The confidence intervals go as low as 37% and as high as ~120%. That's a load of uncertainty. Also the latest document by PHE highlights also the limitations of the current data behind modeling (PCR negative for the S gene, but positive for the others). At this point the good questions haven't been answered yet.

Shorel 6y ago

>During the last lockdown schools remained open Honestly, that doesn't sound like a real lockdown at all.

ryandrake 6y ago
People really need to stop using the l-word. It grossly overstates what's happening. They called it that here in the USA too, and it was just as ridiculous. We had these so-called Stay At Home orders, which had tons of exceptions and were both ignored by the population and unenforced by the government. They might as well have been called Stay At Home Suggestions. An actual sustained lock-down would likely stop the virus's spread, allowing us to finally get back to normal. But nobody wants to claim ownership of the economic fallout, so instead they do these half-assed lock-downs which don't really accomplish much besides making the government look like they're doing something.

hnarn 6y ago

This comment should be flagged, it’s extremely sensationalist and below what I expect from HN. 1. On what basis do you say that people are underestimating the seriousness? Are you a doctor? An epidemiologist? Do you have any medical education? 2. Do you have any supporting evidence for your claim that it’s obvious that something was “off” about Kent and that there is a spread attributable to this? Or are you just drawing lines between dots? You source nothing, so it’s impossible to know. 3. On what basis do you claim that this strain “probably” has spread to tens of other countries? Who are you, and based on what do you make this guess? The pandemic is taxing enough on everybody as it is. We DO NOT need “educated guesses” from armchair epidemiologists that do not identify themselves or what sources they are drawing their conclusions from — and I could expect as much from a random comment field on the internet, but not as the top voted comment on HN.

gns24 6y ago
1. No, I don't have any relevant qualifications. But it's not the epidemiologists who I think are underestimating the seriousness - what's surprising me is that everyone else is largely ignoring this. I think people think 70% is not a big amount, rather than the difference between slight decrease and rapid exponential growth. Clearly a lot of foreign governments do think it's serious given the travel plans they have put in place. 2. I spend an unhealthy amount of time looking at data. Before this incident there were always random peaks which got explained by outbreaks at abattoirs or freshers' week, and national movements, but this change stood out. Week after week it kept behaving differently. My partner and I had already speculated about the change possibly being down to a mutation, since although that seemed incredibly unlikely nothing else explained what we were seeing, but dismissed that idea since obviously the authorities would have noticed. It turned out they had noticed, they just hadn't announced it. 3. A quick calculation: recent infection surveys suggest about 1% of people in the UK have the virus. The new strain makes up about 10%, so 1 in 1000 people have the new strain. In November 2020 from Heathrow alone, 240k people travelled to the EU, 68k to other European countries, 63k to Africa and 82k to North America. If I remember correctly cases have already been found in Denmark and Australia. Denmark does more sequencing than most countries (I don't have a good source for that, but there by-country filters here imply it: https://nextstrain.org/groups/neherlab/ncov/united-kingdom?c=gt-S_501,69&dmin=2020-11-19&f_country=United%20Kingdom&fbclid=IwAR3kseCZPD6aF3SEBSLRT0zMiz7mb8t4G_lV59Ddo8MmW2gqq_ul8U8DNPw&l=unrooted&p=grid https://nextstrain.org/groups/neherlab/ncov/united-kingdom?c... ) Based on this I'd argue that it's more likely than not to already be in tens of other countries. I'd certainly be interested to hear arguments to the contrary. But I don't believe it's sensationalist to suggest this - at this point I'd consider it a miracle if it hasn't spread too far. I hope I'm wrong.

saberdancer 6y ago

I am not from UK but I think this is an important and critical information. How is the daily deaths chart in Kent and London? Deaths will be visible later on than infections but by now there should be a visible effect if IFR/CFR is different. If there is no visible difference it's possible that R0 increased while IFR remains steady (which is bad enough).

dehrmann 6y ago

> We don't know whether we can even stop the growth I think extreme lockdown measures could, but they'd almost have to be indefinite, and there's no appetite for that.

jnxx 6y ago

> This strain has probably already spread to tens of other countries. Every country which is just about holding things together, whatever their strategy, is going to struggle with a significantly more transmissible variant of the virus. Yes. If the new variant is duplicating every week even under medium lock-down measures, as it appears, it will be very difficult to contain it, and impossible with the current set of measures. It would require a very strict lock-down at least. And the vaccinenes would not yet help - they will help later but probably not before late Summer, while the new variant will very likely be all over Europe until March. Thinking about what we know, what appears very likely, and the conclusions of it, the first half of the year will be far away from normal, even catastrophic.