8 ms·
Covid-19: New variant 'raises R number by up to 0.7'
- mrfusion 6y agoAnyone else think this will never end? How many years will you stay home?
- brundolf 6y agoPeople are literally getting vaccinated as we speak.
- mrfusion 6y agohttps://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/16/fauci-why-still-need-masks-social-distancing-after-covid-19-vaccine.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/16/fauci-why-still-need-masks-s... Feels like another goal post being moved. (FWIW I’d love to be wrong, so please share any optimism.)
- heyitsguay 6y agoThere's cause for optimism! Basically, it'll take a big chunk of 2021 to vaccinate everyone (at best), immunity may take a while to kick in, and while vaccines may be 90ish% effective, continuing to follow transmission reduction measures will help further mitigate spread while COVID is still prevalent, so keep it up for a couple months after the bulk of people start receiving vaccines. Not amazing, but also not indefinite, and I believe this has been the messaging for quite a while now.
- Trasmatta 6y agoI'm not sure what you're asking. Do you think vaccines won't work, just because Fauci is advising caution even after you get one? That's good advice until society has widespread immunity, and it has nothing to do with the efficacy of the vaccines.
- throwaway894345 6y agoSurely the reasoning is “since the vaccine is only 95% effective, it is prudent to exercise caution until we reach herd immunity, because you might be one of the 5% who aren’t immune”. But clearly that does pertain to the efficacy of the virus, so I don’t think I understand your meaning.
- Trasmatta 6y agoYou're right, it's partially that and partially the fact that you need two doses and potentially 2 weeks or more after the second dose to hit that 95% effectiveness. I was more responding to the idea that "maybe the vaccine isn't effective at all" which it seemed like the poster above might have been hinting at. Which doesn't make a lot of sense, because the article they linked pretty clearly lays out the rationale.
- throwaway894345 6y agoAh, that makes sense. Thanks for clarifying!
- dehrmann 6y agoHow will we know we've reached it without people taking off masks and gathering in groups? It's also worth mentioning herd immunity depends on r0, and r0 changes when behaviors change.
- oxfordmale 6y agoPandemics like this last two years. It will be over in 2022. Even without vaccine herd immunity would set in at some point. The vaccine roll out is going to speed this up, although it will take until the summer before it starts having a major impact on the number of cases
- mrfusion 6y agoInteresting. What makes you say two years?
- oxfordmale 6y agoSpanish flu lasted about two years.
- IAmGraydon 6y agoYou think this will last two years because a pandemic 100 years ago did? Do you think all pandemics last the same amount of time or...what’s your reasoning here?
- dehrmann 6y agoThe Spanish Flu didn't have as many interventions as we have now, so it was allowed to run its course. We're actually in uncharted territory right now--we've never stopped a pandemic like this before. If the virus mutates faster than we can vaccinate, we could have just dragged out the inevitable. We could have also made it endemic by slowing its spread and selected extra contagious strains. Meanwhile, colds and flus are way down, but there might be unintended consequences of not using your immune system for a year+.
- spideymans 6y ago>Even without vaccine herd immunity would set in at some point. Doesn't immunity only last a few months?
- mrfusion 6y ago
- dm319 6y agoI understand that this is how it feels. But the natural history of pandemics is that they end.
- mrfusion 6y agoThis one will end but how do you fell about these kind of articles? https://www.vice.com/en/article/k7q9x9/humans-living-in-age-of-pandemics-covid-19-coronavirus https://www.vice.com/en/article/k7q9x9/humans-living-in-age-...
- williamstein 6y agoHIV/AIDS is the other pandemic right now.
- a-dub 6y agoyikes... if it still spreads like crazy in commerce/public space shutdown conditions, i wonder if this variant is more conducive to fomite spread. i also wonder what can and should be done now to prepare and lighten the load on frontline nurses and medical staff. maybe it's time to train up and bring in an army of techs to mind the machines?
- ed25519FUUU 6y agoI believe the vaccine is what “lightens the load” so to speak.
- hedora 6y agoIn the US, we decided not to train up more people to help. In fact, over 1,000,000 doctors have been laid off or stopped working during the pandemic. The time to build up our response capacity was this summer. We spent trillions of dollars to buy time, but didn’t spend a comparably small amount of money to actually prepare for this winter. In short, it’s too late. Current shortages of health care were completely predictable and avoidable.
- choward 6y agoExactly, there's two ways to make sure hospitals aren't overrun. Decrease the number of patients or increase capacity. For some reason everyone is only focused on the former.
- a-dub 6y agothere is still more time now than there will be in a few weeks to take steps. they literally built hospitals in 10 days in china, i think we could relax some regs and allow health systems/med schools to train up a few thousand technicians. this whole "oh welp we fucked up let's just let the healthcare system deal with it" attitude is terrible. there are steps that can be taken now.
- claydavisss 6y agoSome time in 2021 the public may have to accept that Covid is never really going to go away. It will be interesting to watch the Democrats be forced to be the ones to force society back to work after being the primary political force for lockdowns
- yash_8141 6y agoIs there any theory or data that more the R or transmission rate less deadly the virus is in itself?Because then this might be good news.We reach herd immunity sooner with less chaos.
- u801e 6y agoI don't think that herd immunity can be achieved without a vaccine. We never had herd immunity to smallpox, polio, measles, mumps, rubella, varicella, or any other virus until we had vaccines for those viral diseases.
- rich_sasha 6y agoIt is already bearing chaos in British hospitals, and it’s early days. With 50k infections a day, say the true number is 100k, in 3 months only about 1.5% of the UK popularion get infected, not really significant for her immunity numbers.
- kolinko 6y agoWell, it’s a week after x-mass so all countries see big increases because of family gatherings
- mynegation 6y agoIs that right? 100K daily infections give you 100,000 x 30 x 3 = 9,000,000 in three months which is 13% of 68M. Not anywhere close to herd immunity but not 1.5% either
- fellow_human 6y agoVaccinations can bring us closer to herd immunity too. Or at least take the load of the hospital system by covering off the vulnerable population.
- oxfordmale 6y agoBased on an IFR of 0.44, around 17 million already have contracted Covid. 9 million will not get us to full herd immunity, however, will reduce super spreading events (as super spreaders will already have had the disease)
- tejohnso 6y ago> Further research is needed to understand why the variant is spreading so quickly. But early indications are that vaccines should be effective against it.
- Pyramus 6y agoI will for the life of me not understand why (many) reputable media sources do not link the primary research. Make it a small link at the end of the article. That's it. https://www.imperial.ac.uk/mrc-global-infectious-disease-analysis/covid-19/report-42-sars-cov-2-variant/ https://www.imperial.ac.uk/mrc-global-infectious-disease-ana...
- the-dude 6y agoObviously, you are not a publisher. They don't want you to leave their premises. That's why.
- kossTKR 6y agoInteresting. I've thought about why journalism in general today never links to anything, sources or even mentions any competing media of any kind. Often you think why don't they just mention the book, the theory, the article. A pretty sad state of affairs and against everything that makes the "web" great.
- oliwarner 6y agoBBC doesn't make money from it's pageviews from it's main audience though.
- erentz 6y agoAn interesting thread here on this topic. That 0.7 increase can have devastating impacts. Also worth noting this variant is now spreading in SoCal, CO, and most recently found in FL too. So the post holiday surge that’s already underway could get compounded by this variant. https://mobile.twitter.com/dgurdasani1/status/1344774555718590464 https://mobile.twitter.com/dgurdasani1/status/13447745557185...
- CydeWeys 6y agoPeople have been saying since early 2020 that this winter was going to be the absolute worst of it (based on historical experience with e.g. the 1918 flu pandemic), and they were right. They didn't anticipate how quickly we'd develop a vaccine, but they also didn't anticipate such a more contagious variant. And the vaccine unfortunately won't roll out fast enough this winter to really put a damper on it. I fear that by February most cities will be going through what we here in NYC faced last April.
- kossTKR 6y agoI agree, but i also find it quite weird that the "seasonal angle" has been almost non existent, so why are people surprised? Most regions of the world have been following the regular flu intensity almost to a T. Especially in northern Europe after a summer with almost open societies and no grave surges. With this in mind we will peak when regular flu used to peak, ie. we are only now at the very start of some very bad months (for the latitudes with winter now). Also while this new variant may be the culprit, the regular flu probably also mutates in a similar pattern - though it could be that this variant is a heavy factor, but for me we are still pretty much following the seasons.
- dm319 6y agoHad a quick look at the figures for the UK today - it looks really bad, we've just overtaken the US on daily caserate at around 750 new daily cases / million. Germany were previously increasing fairly alarmingly in November, but seem to have been able to slow the increase down, if not get it heading down again. France had a large spike in November, got it under control in December, but are on the rise again (though under a new lockdown/curfew as of today). The problem now in the UK is the winter pressures are at their worst, we haven't even seen the impact of Christmas relaxation yet, and we've just exceeded the peak number of covid inpatients seen in the first wave. We're going to start seeing hospitals closing to new admissions soon (diverting to other nearby hospitals) as they hit full capacity.
- lumberingjack 6y agoMeanwhile in the "hardest hit" county in Ohio. The county commissioner is explaining to everyone this morning why the official covid numbers don't actually matter don't make any sense. And that that little map they have is totally bogus.
- selimthegrim 6y agoFranklin? Cuyahoga?
- ed25519FUUU 6y agoI’m interesting the research going into “excess death” statistics, which I think will be the only “true” death rate from the pandemic[1]. > So how do we get this bigger picture? That’s where what researchers call “excess death” data come in. Simply put, excess deaths are the difference between the number of deaths that were expected to occur during a given time period and the number of deaths that actually occurred. I suspect some deaths are being mis-attributed to C19 (for example that gunshot story). While other things are probably being undercounted. 1. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cdcresponse/accomplishments/excess-death-data.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cdcresponse/accomp...
- choward 6y agoExcess deaths aren't entirely useful since they also include deaths caused by the covid mandates. Those deaths will also be occurring over the next several years which will make it more interesting.
- llampx 6y agoWhich covid mandates are causing death?
- ralfn 6y agoLockdowns drastically increase the amount of domestic violence. Also deferred medical care because the health care system is overloaded. Finally, people are not getting the best health care money can buy. In most countries if you are very old or have underlying conditions making your survival chance very low, they don't offer to try everything. Excess death is a useful metric for the true total body count of Corona, including all cultural, economic and policy changes it entails. However it's really hard to accurately provide any number for the mortality of the disease itself.
- nmca 6y agoCan anyone point to an explanation of how much the 60% Oxford vaccine will help things, both in the old case and in light of the new variant? I have approximately 0% intuition for how much a 60% vaccine helps.
- oxfordmale 6y agoThe Oxford vaccine might only be 60% effective preventing COVID infections, howver, it is much more effective in reducing hospitalisation and deaths. Contracting flu is a bummer, but a minor inconvenience when compared to dying.
- nmca 6y agoCan you provide citations for this (first sentence)? My understanding is that there were no deaths in the treatment arm of the trial. But deaths are much rarer than infections so naively our uncertainty on this effect should be much larger than uncertainty about 60% infection rate reduction. Secondly, even if true, does this mean full restrictions until all are vaccinated?
- oxfordmale 6y agohttps://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)32661-1/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
- nmca 6y agoThanks - I re-read this. There was one death in the control arm, which was one of two severe cases (table 5). No statistical analysis is presented of those results (if they were significant under any straightforward model I suspect it would have been mentioned) I think it's too early to claim that there is strong evidence that the Oxford vaccine reduces cases of severe covid.
- jey 6y agoThe underlying question is how much of the population has to be immune for "herd immunity" to take effect. The pandemic will burn out once enough people (let's say X% of the population) are immune to the virus, and this is called "herd immunity". Let's take the UK as our population. If a vaccine is 60% effective and we administer it to everyone in the UK, then about 60% of the UK's population will gain immunity to COVID. Another Y% of the population will have immunity to COVID already, even if the vaccine didn't work for them. Then the question is, is Y + 60 > X, thereby achieving herd immunity? You can see that if a vaccine is 95% effective, it's more likely to be above the herd immunity threshold of X%. Current estimates for X are about 70%.
- jibcage 6y agoAre there any indications yet that this makes masks less effective for controlling the spread indoors? And if so, by how much? “Raises R number” could mean any number of things - is it more infectious through touch, by breathing it in, or when viral particles reach your eyes?
- Pyramus 6y agoWikipedia has a good summary of what we know: "there were insufficient data to reach any conclusion on underlying mechanism of increased transmissibility (e.g. increased viral load, tissue distribution of virus replication, serial interval etc.)" [1] > is it more infectious through touch, by breathing it in, or when viral particles reach your eyes? I think a better mental model of transmissibility is to think of what concentration of viral particles is needed to trigger the reproduction. It seems that there is some early indication that the new variant binds more easily to human cells (N501Y mutation) so a lower concentration of particles is needed, and also infected hosts distribute more particles (higher viral load). An actual expert on viral transmission please chime in. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variant_of_Concern_202012/01#Transmissibility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variant_of_Concern_202012/01#T...
- hannob 6y agoI think this is the one covid fact far too many people haven't internalized yet. This changes everything. It means in essence for everything we do to slow down covid from spreading, we need to add additional measures on top of that to achieve the same effect.
- rurban 6y ago0.4 - 0.7. The original R increase was published as 0.4, and so far I believe the lower number. The critical insight is not R being a bit higher, R could be easily brought down by 2.5 by policy measures, but the age group of <20 being dominant there. That's why R is a bit higher.
- thinkingemote 6y agoThe range is from 0.4 to 0.7 The research found a spread, not a new stable level. The average was towards the lower end than the higher.