Coronavirus

It would have been worse if they hadn't announced anything. We'd have then been covering up the new strain. Besides, it's been around months.

But this strain or strains with a similar mutation have indeed been spotted in other countries. The difference here is that the government has used it as an excuse for the huge increase in numbers instead of blaming their own inadequate handling of the virus. You have to go some to find a country in the world who has handled this quite as bad as the UK.

Now because the Tories have used the mutation as the reason (of which there is no evidence that it is the reason btw) they just handed the EU an advantage on a silver platter. The perfect chance to show millions of Britons what no deal with the EU would mean for Britain. The EU is now laughing at us for our governments sheer incompetence. I'm not sure we could have had a more incompetent PM, even Jeremy Corbyn and his cronies would have had to have been on top form to beat this.

Well played Boris, simply outstanding!

Dont be too harsh.
The Home Secretary says the Government has been "ahead of the curve throughout"

"Priti Patel has claimed the government has been “consistently... ahead of the curve” in its response to the coronavirus pandemic, despite one of the highest death tolls in the world and Saturday’s last-minute decision to effectively cancel Christmas for large swathes of the country.

Interviewed on the BBC’s Today programme, the home secretary was asked about the chief scientific adviser’s warning on Monday that it was critical to to “get ahead” of the new mutant strain of coronavirus detected in the UK.

Patel replied: “Well the government has consistently throughout this year been ahead of the curve in terms of proactive measures in regard in terms of coronavirus measures.”

On Saturday the government held a last-minute press conference in which it announced London and the south-east of England would be put into new, tougher tier 4 restrictions.

The move came after nine months of Boris Johnson assuring the UK that some semblance of a normal Christmas would be possible.

Pressed on the apparent last-minute nature of the tier 4 announcement, Patel said: “Well there was nothing last minute in terms of the work undertaken by government in terms of planning and preparing for tier 4."

Captain Catchup strikes again.

Open up all the shops on a promise of a five day Christmas. Let everyone spend a sh1tload of cash, then cancel the festivities. Wouldn't put it past this lot.

It also hands France and others a bargaining chip over Brexit to leverage a more favourable deal out of us, especially over the disputed fishing grounds.

Well done Boris the blunderer.

Watching the news and the way the virus is now spreading again, it may be that the footy season will get curtailed again. Think they should just lock everyone down now; It's running rampant.

Tier 4 imminent for other regions:

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/gold-command-meeting-considers-birmingham-23208818

Do you reckon having a second strain of covid would mean that you could catch it a second time? Therefore needing to isolate from the public for ten days at a convenient moment such as a third peak of covid deaths or a monumental intercourse up of international trade negotiations? Asking for an idiot.

From reading on Derek Lowe's blog, there was a link to a preprint study indicating that the antibodies for the general strains still seem to be effective against the N501Y mutation (no, I don't really fully understand what the N501Y bit means either). This mutation has apparently developed independently in South Africa and appears to be spreading quickly there as well.

However, this still isn't absolute proof that it is more transmissible as they've had their own surge over there recently, too. Might be effect rather than cause. Probably more transmissible but not absolutely certainly until more investigations have been made.

If the general antibodies from other strains are still effective, you shouldn't really be at any greater risk of catching it a second time. Or, at least, not much more.

Here's an interesting twitter thread which shows how a common human coronavirus has evolved over the past 40 years to develop immunity to older antibodies:

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1339939720558563328.html

Difficult to understand but, fundamentally, antibodies for the modern strains of this human coronavirus tend to be effective against all of the strains of the virus from the past 40 years. However, antibodies which developed against this human coronavirus 40 years ago, wouldn't touch the modern strains. Main thing to understand is that it's an incremental thing.

Assuming that this translates across to Covid-19, it's likely that the current antibodies will most likely be effective against this year's strains, but a bit less so against next year's, a bit less the year after and so on until they don't work at all. Reading between the lines (i.e. I'm making a half-educated guess), it ought to be the case that the vaccines which are rolling out now should provide enough protection to stop most severe disease in the immediate future which will hopefully allow time for treatments to be developed for alleviate the severe autoimmune response responsible for the deadly cases. These types of virus tend to evolve to be less deadly over time in any case, so hopefully we can up the timescale for this, even if it takes booster vaccines every couple of years or so.

Of course, this doesn't mean that the government hasn't been shambolically incompetent once again. Chances are, they probably have on one way or another, but it might actually be the case that they were being sincere with this particular Tier 4/quasi-lockdown stuff.

Quoted from Stadium

Tier 4 imminent for other regions:

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/gold-command-meeting-considers-birmingham-23208818

Now confirmed from Boxing Day.

Not us though.

Suffolk had escaped the worse of it until a couple of weeks ago but now it's everywhere . Tier four from boxing day.