Coronavirus: awaiting for the new wave

Global news: Catsplosion in Australia.

 

Not. Funny. In. The. Least.

If you two are going to joke about murdering cats, I'm out of here.

 

Hey, we only joke in the safety of knowing we aren't ever going to kill any cats

 

Quite possibly the new strain in the UK (we don't seem to have agreed a name yet) is an offshoot of the mink-related one noticed earlier. According to the European Centre for Disease Control, the new strain has 17 mutations, 10 of them in the spike protein. In the spike protein three are deletions (at positions 69, 70 and 144), the other seven are substitutions. The deletions at position 69 and 70 are also present in the mink related strain, so a connection is plausible, although the substitution mutations are different between the two. Similar substitution mutations have also been noted in a strain from South Africa, in particular the N501Y mutation in the receptor binding surface.

This strain does seem to have picked up rather more mutations in a short space of time than you'd expect just from the typical mutation rate of the virus we've observed so far. Transfer to and from another animal species would be a possible explanation, although there are others.

 

Our RIVM will double the sequencing from 500 to 1,000 samples per week.
So far two cases have been found in the Netherlands with the UK strain. One had been in the UK, the other not.

 

Department of Conservation here also kills ferals.

Alot of NZ native birds can't fly so feral cats wreck the ecology as the birdlife has no defense's. They prey on penguin chicks. Lizards as well.

They use offshore islands that are predator free to create sanctuary's.

The Kiwi was endangered and Kakapo brought back from the brink of extinction.

Dexter's my little furbaby but he's very good at catching bird's.

 

So it's not just the Irish now?

 

I mean it's morbid, but feral cats are a massive problem killing millions of native animals, and need to be dealt with. And the fact that they give the poisons cute pun names, discussed in clinical detail by official sources, is nearly textbook dark comedy.

 

Same thing here but poisons a lot rarer. Traps and shooting same reason as Aussie. Fragile ecosystems.

 

What does Russian news report about Argentina? Because here we're getting a live coverage of the (twice?)-delayed national airline flight to be sent to fetch The Vaccine™ while at the same time we hear the government's quietly negotiating with Pfizer.

 

They say 300,000 doses will be delivered to Argentina in next few days. But refer to Argentinian newspapers.

I don't know if this amount of vaccine is available. In Russia the only region where vaccination de-facto started is Moscow, and even here it's available only for certain categories of people, though it was broadened recently. People say the process is cumbersome, one vial contains doses for 5 people and must be used immediately after unfreezing. So, people have to wait until group of 5 is organized and then, wait 30 minutes after injection (I guess to check for allergy and stuff like that).

 

Well, we'll have to wait and see.
So far Argentine media report 257 new deaths today, quite a way up from the low that was under a hundred last week.

Also Mexico's reached a new record for daily contagion.

 

Conga line why the F not?

https://www.nydailynews.com/coronav...0201221-gtciyoyv7zchraeoskvto3youm-story.html

GoP MAGA.

 

A guy wrote his impressions after being vaccinated. Nothing special, only appointment was early in the morning and he was very sleepy. So, after injection he was told to wait in the room, where he fell asleep on a coach. Was woken up by a nurse.

- You've lost consciousness??
- Yeah. Sort of.

 

There's a new strain of the virus that is far more contagious than the first and just as deadly. Are the vaccines they are making now even protecting against it?

There are people dying from the bubonic plague to this day, which started back in the middle ages. It is nowhere near a given that this is ending any time soon, even with vaccinations. Especially with the world being far more interconnected now than in earlier periods of history.

 

How do you know if the new strain is more deadly?

 

According to Ginzburg (director of Gamaleya research), vaccine should work against new strain.

 

About this "70% more contagious" statement:

https://khub.net/documents/13593956...b-161f-2fd5-1030-32b6ab467896?t=1608470511452

I am not sure, what exactly they mean with "growth rate", but it is likely going to be a very poor measure for contagiousness, because other variants might not be growing at all or even declining.

The R0 value is a much better measure and if it is around 3 for the other variants, this would mean an increase of 15%-30%. Which is bad, but nowhere nearly as bad as a 70% increase would be.

 

France has decided to allow truckers across the channel if they have a negative test, and are accepting the lateral flow test. Lateral flow means "soaking along a bit of filter paper", and is a technology most familiar in pregnancy tests. The data indicates it misses more than it catches:

 

For first time in my life, I am not going to pass Xmas eve with my mother, brothers, sister, nephews and nieces due to social distancing
It is a balanced decision, I know we have to do this, but I feel sad and dejected