COVID19 Update - Day 291

US Tests: 207,104,407*

US Cases: 18,755,195*

US Deaths: 323,401*

Worldwide Cases: 80,273,645*

Worldwide Deaths: 1,756,435*

* - Numbers are a lower bound.  True numbers are being suppressed by the Trump administration

Bad news, good news, bad news.  A couple of days ago, I mentioned that there appears to be a new variant of the #TrumpVirus in Great Britain, one which spreads more quickly.  Vox has an update:

They don’t have this nailed down yet for sure, but four converging streams of evidence are all pointing in the same direction. “That’s making people feel like maybe there is something here to be worried about,” Hodcroft says. “Each one of these things on their own, I would say is not necessarily convincing.” But all together, they paint a concerning picture.

One is that in the areas of the UK where this new variant is spreading, it is accounting for a larger proportion of new cases. “What this implies is that this new variant is spreading better than other variants that are circulating in the same region,” she says.

A second is that the increase didn’t co-occur with any overly obvious change in human behavior. “We don’t really have strong evidence that everyone in the southeast [UK where this variant is spreading] has just ripped their masks off and is, you know, totally violating restrictions,” she says. That said, it could be a coincidence. It could be just that people who happen to have contracted this variant have it are spreading it more often via their behavior.

After all, “this new variant has emerged at a time of the year when there has traditionally been increased family and social mixing,” according to the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control, which estimated that the transmissibility of the new variant has increased by 70 percent compared to prior versions of the virus. (Both Rasmussen and Hodcroft say the 70 percent more transmissible figure is most likely an overestimate.)

Third, there’s some early data about how this variant acts in Covid-19 patients. “There may be slightly higher viral loads in patients with the variants,” Hodcroft says, suggesting the virus has an easier time replicating in the body. (Viral load refers to the amount of virus in the patient. Rasmussen also cautions that viral load data is really sensitive to timing and when the patient was sampled in the course of the illness, so there needs to be more data to confirm this.)

Finally, the genetic changes in the UK variant mirror changes in the South African variant, which has also been associated with rising case numbers. That makes a plausible link: that this particular genetic change may be behind the increased transmissibility in both variants.

So, that's the bad news.  The good news is that there's no evidence (so far) that it's any more deadly than the original version.  More good news, according to Vox, is that we should respond to this new variant the same way we responded to the old one --- "Mask-wearing, social distancing, and good indoor ventilation are as critical as ever."

That's also the final piece of bad news --- since a sizable and particularly vocal chunk of the population has decided that they would rather be entitled crybabies than support "Mask-wearing, social distancing, and good indoor ventilation".

(I'm very proud of myself that I wrote that last paragraph without using swears).