Have scientists been able to confirm that the virus just isn't infecting children, versus infecting them asymptomatically? Is this new strain more symptomatic in children?
Essentially: does the UK do baseline testing (whether or not you appear symptomatic, unlike the US) across all age groups to a point that we can tell children are now being infected at a higher rate?
There are a number of programmes like this one at Imperial - https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/197217/home-testing-coronavi... and another that I can't find a link to at UCL. The UCL one in particular was about regular whole-family testing, although I pity the parents who try to regularly test their kids - my 5-year-old would probably chew her own arm off rather than have a cotton bud shoved a long way up her nose again...
Edit: This was also an interesting BBC podcast where they spoke to a researcher who found antibodies that respond to this coronavirus in blood samples from children that were taken years before this outbreak, suggesting that children have some kind of pre-existing immunity: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000mzpr
Why are they so confident existing vaccines in development will work against the new strain? Isn't that why we get a new flu shot every year, because vaccines don't work against mutated viruses?
Flu changes particularly fast, coronaviruses change much more slowly. However this new covid strain does have some differences in the critical 'spike' bit that vaccines target. They are fairly confident the vaccines will still work. They are doing lab tests to verify. I read somewhere that we'll know more in 2 weeks but I can't remember where I saw that. If the vaccines arent so effective against the new strain, its relatively easy to tweak them (its not like starting from scratch, we know the vaccine approaches work, just need to tweak the payload a little).
> “There is a hint that it has a higher propensity to infect children,” said Neil Ferguson, a professor and infectious disease epidemiologist at Imperial College London and also a member of NERVTAG.
Yeah, we all remember who he is. Forgive me if I take any quotes from Neil Ferguson with a spoon of salt.
> Ferguson's research has raised questions by virologist Hendrik Streeck. Ferguson is the corresponding author for a paper titled "Impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to reduce COVID-19 mortality and healthcare demand", which describes itself as having "informed policymaking in the UK and other countries in recent weeks".[55] Streeck stated in reference to the paper "In the – really good – model studies by the Imperial College about the progress of the epidemic, the authors assume, for example, that 50 percent of households in which there is a case do not comply with the voluntary quarantine. Where does such an assumption come from? I think we should establish more facts."[56] The computer models which Ferguson authored were initially criticised as "unreliable" and "a buggy mess,"[57][58] but subsequent efforts to reproduce the results were successful.[59]
What was wrong with the modelling though? Even after all we know now leaving the epidemic unchecked would easily triple our yearly mortality. Based on what we know now we'd still do lockdowns. Probably more severe and shorter ones sooner.
Thanks for the clarification, though I'm not sure that strengthens your case against him - while there may be dissenting voices his work is still considered mainstream I think?
If you want people to know what you're saying, you need to unpack your comment more than your initial one. I also read this as a snide aside about his love life, which is a pretty easy interpretation. Do you have a link to something more substantive than your comments here?
Edit: The quote seems pretty clear - "we see it in the data" - which would just be a higher rate of infections in children, and he's clearly speaking as a member of NERVTAG, not just as himself.
England, mainly with Ferguson, and now with this new "super" mutating virus is ending the last dime of credibility that scientists had with the civil society. After this pandemic, no one will ever listen to a scientist again. Maybe not everyone, but a good percentage of the population for sure.
One of the "interesting" things about the new strain is that generally there is genetic drift happening all the time with the virus and you can trace it internationally into a sort of 'family tree'. This can be used to work out how it is spreading geographically, its like a fingerprint that changes as it spreads.
The new strain is notable because it has no obvious ancestors - it has about 14 or so changes that can't be traced backwards in the tree. This points to it arising within one immunocompromised individual.
"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."
"These considerations lead us to hypothesise that the unusual genetic divergence of lineage B.1.1.7 may have resulted, at least in part, from virus evolution with a chronically-infected individual. Although such infections are rare, and onward transmission from them presumably even rarer, they are not improbable given the ongoing large number of new infections."
In all of this, its worth remembering we've never tracked an epidemic in this much detail before, so perhaps this sort of thing is just par for the course.
Genetic drift that fixates 14 new mutations, including deletions, in the most negative selected gene in this virus is an abomination, almost statistically impossible, very very close to 0. Even if the incubation and infection time inside this one individual was enough for 1,000,000 generations there's no way for something like that to happen.
"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."
No, this unprecedented on any living and non-living thing that we know.[1]
"In all of this, its worth remembering we've never tracked an epidemic in this much detail before, so perhaps this sort of thing is just par for the course."
We tracked very well the flu during its high season, and influenza genomes are used constant to monitor mutations and other aspects of viral evolution, population genetics and phylogeny.
Impossible is a strong word in biology. Evolution goes faster when there are selective pressures - monoclonal antibodies treatment and weak immune system could plausibly create such pressure
Evolution is not a random search. Hence why GA/GP is a thing in computing
Especially if it all happened inside one person, negative selection of a gene means this person kept shedding until the changes made it to other people
28 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 58.3 ms ] threadEssentially: does the UK do baseline testing (whether or not you appear symptomatic, unlike the US) across all age groups to a point that we can tell children are now being infected at a higher rate?
Edit: This was also an interesting BBC podcast where they spoke to a researcher who found antibodies that respond to this coronavirus in blood samples from children that were taken years before this outbreak, suggesting that children have some kind of pre-existing immunity: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000mzpr
Yeah, we all remember who he is. Forgive me if I take any quotes from Neil Ferguson with a spoon of salt.
Turns out the model was something like 10,000 lines of undocumented and untested C code, which was... basically impossible to analyze or explain.
> Ferguson's research has raised questions by virologist Hendrik Streeck. Ferguson is the corresponding author for a paper titled "Impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to reduce COVID-19 mortality and healthcare demand", which describes itself as having "informed policymaking in the UK and other countries in recent weeks".[55] Streeck stated in reference to the paper "In the – really good – model studies by the Imperial College about the progress of the epidemic, the authors assume, for example, that 50 percent of households in which there is a case do not comply with the voluntary quarantine. Where does such an assumption come from? I think we should establish more facts."[56] The computer models which Ferguson authored were initially criticised as "unreliable" and "a buggy mess,"[57][58] but subsequent efforts to reproduce the results were successful.[59]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Ferguson_(epidemiologist)
[59] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01685-y
He lacks moral authority due to an incident which he has rightly been criticised for - what has that got to do with his scientific expertise?
https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Ferguson_(epidemiologist...
Edit: The quote seems pretty clear - "we see it in the data" - which would just be a higher rate of infections in children, and he's clearly speaking as a member of NERVTAG, not just as himself.
1. Scientist predicts x by y.
2. Politicians take action to prevent x by y.
3. x by y didn't happen, therefor scientists were wrong.
It's like complaining your sys admins do nothing because nothing ever breaks. Or that Y2K was a conspiracy theory because it was prevented.
e.g. the tree diagrams in this tweet: https://twitter.com/firefoxx66/status/1340359989395861506
The new strain is notable because it has no obvious ancestors - it has about 14 or so changes that can't be traced backwards in the tree. This points to it arising within one immunocompromised individual.
See https://virological.org/t/preliminary-genomic-characterisati...
"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."
"These considerations lead us to hypothesise that the unusual genetic divergence of lineage B.1.1.7 may have resulted, at least in part, from virus evolution with a chronically-infected individual. Although such infections are rare, and onward transmission from them presumably even rarer, they are not improbable given the ongoing large number of new infections."
In all of this, its worth remembering we've never tracked an epidemic in this much detail before, so perhaps this sort of thing is just par for the course.
"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."
No, this unprecedented on any living and non-living thing that we know.[1]
"In all of this, its worth remembering we've never tracked an epidemic in this much detail before, so perhaps this sort of thing is just par for the course."
We tracked very well the flu during its high season, and influenza genomes are used constant to monitor mutations and other aspects of viral evolution, population genetics and phylogeny.
[1] https://www.pnas.org/content/96/24/13910
Especially if it all happened inside one person, negative selection of a gene means this person kept shedding until the changes made it to other people