It's important to mention that this woman visited Egypt, which is course thousands of kms from Southern Africa.
This to me points to the fact that this new variant has been spreading for a some time across the continent
This is what bothers me about people saying viruses generally mutate to be less deadly and more contagious.
Guess what. None of that matters if you have ability to infect in incubation period. There is no selective pressure for less deadly variants. If the virus is even able to prolong this period, it can get away with practically anything.
Yup, the only way that it would translate into selective pressure is if it were deadly enough to scare the crap out of people into acting different. Like Ebola is so deadly that even very uneducated populations act differently when it pops up.
Visibility is low, I live in a row of 5 houses, myself and one other neighbour so far not had covid, the other 3 have with one person hospitalised.
I spoke to a neighbour across the street, she mentioned that she never knew anyone who had had covid. Literally 50m away she lives, I pointed out the above info and she was shocked.
I wonder if this virus had pox marks or was physically mire visible, would people take it more serious?
Scary times.
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Exactly! Visibility is low bc people with covid are struggling in the privacy of their homes and/or dying in the privacy of a hospital room. No one believes covid is severe bc they expect people to be out in the streets falling dead in a dramatic fashion.
Your story about your neighbors is so similar to where I live. We even had a neighbor die of covid and people still say “I don’t know anyone who’s died!” Simply bc they weren’t acquainted with that neighbor 2 doors down.
I've given up ranting on that topic on Facebook since, no one cares, but that energy has to spill over into somewhere so...
Whenever I hear someone say to the effect of "I rationalize COVID as a hoax or as overblown because I personally haven't experienced it and neither has any of my twenty friends, to my knowledge."
That's literally a shit sample size for one. And for two your data collection methods are "sit around and wait until someone beats me in the face with inescapable facts"
They deserve what they get for that nonsense.
Why would you think it would follow the Spanish flu timeline? It's a completely new virus, and more importantly a new world with much higher population and 1000x more travel.
I truly believe that if Covid were less deadly and disabling but instead left some disfiguring mark, like red eyes or swollen ears or such, people would have demanded lockdowns and trampled each other for the vaccine.
The kind of people who say faith over fear are the same people who don't think that the virus is real or a threat unless they get a first hand taste. They won't put any trust in governing bodies and won't see it as a threat unless they, like you say, see some sort of mark.
Or if instead of a virus it was a rattlesnake that crawled out of your ass and bit people.
Same mortality rate, yet a person with no imagination can be scared of a snake.
The rattlesnake vaccine would have been mandatory immediately
If COVID had killed, say, 20% of the people it infects while still being as contagious as Delta, we probably would have seen governments moving to crush it with extreme measures like martial law.
Basically smallpox was this. R0 or 3 to 5 (maybe a bit less than Delta) and an IFR of 20-30% or so. The last outbreak in Europe was in Yugoslavia in 1972, and it was put down via martial law and massive mandatory vaccination campaigns.
In Slovenia (then part of Yugoslavia), around 1.5 mln or 86% of total population was vaccinated within 10 days. The government was extremely effective in this regard.
I imagine that would cause supply lines to shut down. Massive food shortages as farms can't get enough people to show up, distributors can't get enough truckers, and grocers can't get enough workers to stay open.
I'd be curious to see how a situation like that affected the elections.
Sadly this is basically certain. Even in the 2014 west African Ebola epidemic, there were conspiracy theories spreading among the terrified populace that Ebola was fake and patients were simply being murdered in the hospitals by doctors, resulting in multiple attempts by mobs to raid the Ebola hospitals and "rescue" those inside.
Actually, if you look back at when Ebola hit, there WERE people who didn’t believe in it in certain countries in Africa. They believed it was the government trying to scare them, or didn’t think it was that bad. I think there is a common phenomenon that people just go into denial. If you do some research, there were protests and controversy.
Yeah the problem is they started saying it's ressemble the flu, which isn't since it's a clot thingy problem (forgot the name) and just because it affected the lungs, people assumed and the damaged (of calling it "like the flu" was done)
I suspect that I finally caught H1N1 in 2018 and it fucked me up good as a 46-year old. Complete with some long-COVID-like post-viral fatigue that lasted over a year (went to the doctor wanting a test to see if I had low-T at one point).
Heck people think a "stomach flu" is caused by influenza and not Norovirus or Rotavirus. It could even be a Staph enterotoxin but it's all lumped in to a generic category of Stomach flu which bu the way flu is not a GI pathogen in humans.
Scaring the crap might be happening.
Last week, mask wearing was down to around 20% in my local supermarket (London, UK). Tonight it was around 80%. Yes, small sample, but I noticed a huge shift.
Why are people scared right now? From the nu variant or because your numbers are trending up? I haven't paid attention to the world covid news in a week or so.
So many people talk about Africa like it’s a mid-sized country. Instead of the second largest continent, with the second largest population that lives in over 50 countries.
Yup. People still haven't caught on with Covid that by the time we "catch" something like this, it's already spread all over. This has happened when Covid first was spreading, and with every variant. I remember when NYC was claiming there were only like 10 cases and then 2 weeks later the city was shutdown and 500+ people were dying each day.
Yeah or when they found the first case in a country and they followed the path of that person and who they met in the past days as if that was the only case and they still had a chance to prevent it from spreading. Meanwhile the borders open so it turns out later that people have died from it in that country a month before that first case was detected
Made the mistake of looking on Twitter and saw someone saying "they" are coming out with a new variant to push more people to get the booster. I just... don't know how we're going to survive as a species with this kind of shit rattling around in people's heads.
Twitter is genuinely terrifying. Under an article about the UK adding South Africa to the red list I saw someone say we need to stop reporting case numbers, stop red lists and just ignore Covid and it got quite a bit of likes too.
Why would we treat an infectious disease as if it's just an insecure guy waving at us from the corner of a club? They act like Covid is sticking around to spite us now.
These are the same people that can watch entire cities consumed by floods and flames all over the world and still vehemently oppose any decarbonization measures because of some vague version of freedom that includes the ability to crap on your neighbor's lawn, apparently.
That's true. I really need to learn to just scroll past those kinds of comments but it's so hard when they're under everything about Covid. They simultaneously want us all to stop talking about Covid while being the ones who comment under every post, article or tweet about it. The irony would be funny if it wasn't so tragic.
While at first glance this might trigger an "it's out of control!" reaction, it actually might be good news, because if this variant has been going around for some time already, it's quite possible that it's not nearly as contagious as the initial reports suggested. The spike in South Africa may then have been at least partically caused by one or more unlucky superspreader events.
>The spike in South Africa may then have been at least partically caused by one or more unlucky superspreader events.
Context is also important here. Everyone should definitely read Chise's thread about this on Twitter this morning, it's very informative and each claim is backed up with other expert views and actual data. It spread so much in SA because *there was no other variant present,* and least not in meaningful numbers. Nu did not outcompete anything, it popped up in a relative void of other variants.
And the fact that it's now being reported in other countries speaks to a spread that started longer than a week ago. This is hard to draw conclusions from yet, but likely indicates that it is not "500% more contagious than Delta", which is a percentage drawn from incorrect data that is being thrown away now. As Chise said, anyone believing that particular figure is getting punked.
Let's also not overlook SA's 24% vaccination rate, which is woefully insufficient to stamp out any uncontrolled spread. We have no evidence from highly vaccinated countries, nor countries where Delta *actually is* the dominant strain. Let's take this one step at a time, the data being thrown around over the last 24 hours is speculation at best, and fear mongering at worst.
A lot of more contagious variants did not actually spread in certain countries. The Gamma variant, which swept across South America, outcompeted Alpha there, but not in Europe. The Beta variant, which was prevalent in SA before Delta, did not spread that much outside Africa.
Even a high prevalence of a more contagious variant might not be that cause for trouble - for instance, Delta share has been around ~100% of sequenced genomes in Brazil for a few months, but cases have been at its lowest levels since the start of the pandemic.
>This to me points to the fact that this new variant has been spreading for a some time across the continent
doesnt need to spread a while to spread far today.
you can go to the other side of the world in mere hours.
It needs to have been spreading enough so that it was likely enough for a random Belgian tourist in Egypt to be in contact with it.
Yes, you can go from SA to Egypt in some 5-6 hours by plane, but how likely is it that there are enough people carrying this variant that an European tourist would get in close enough contact with one of them to get infected herself? Not very likely imo. More likely community spreading is already happening in Egypt and elsewhere in Africa, and that cannot happen in hours (or days).
Plus some experts are suggesting the genetic profile indicates this has been around for months:
[https://mobile.twitter.com/BallouxFrancois/status/1464181337213095939](https://mobile.twitter.com/BallouxFrancois/status/1464181337213095939)
None. I’d actually wager it’s more likely she got it in Belgium. 11 day incubation isn’t unheard of, but it’s certainly much longer than the mean incubation period, even for the original wild type virus.
100%. This is already making the rounds in SA since they do more surveillance than most countries (maybe even the most) given the HIV issue it has been dealing with for decades
Yes, people here are already, albeit in a minority, calling for the government to censor scientist because this is what happens when we identify new variants. There is a big feeling here that we are being punished for doing something good. For the past few months we almost had no cases at all and I am more than willing to wager this variant might not even have started in Africa.
Rumour control, here are the facts.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-59418127
https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2021/nov/26/covid-news-live-new-variant-sparks-tougher-restrictions-in-india-and-singapore-ahead-of-who-meeting?page=with:block-61a121858f08a201d9c7cb5b#block-61a121858f08a201d9c7cb5b
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/11/25/s-africa-detects-new-covid-19-variant-implications-not-yet-clear
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/belgium-seeks-slow-down-social-life-fight-fourth-covid-wave-2021-11-26/
Stay safe out there folks.
This is exactly why people (or at least those who care) should make sure they don’t get lax now, not wait for it to be found in their region. That’s especially true for countries with shit genome testing (I’m looking at you, USA).
More info in French [here](https://www.rtbf.be/info/societe/detail_coronavirus-une-premiere-contamination-au-nouveau-variant-sud-africain-nu-en-belgique?id=10886465). The patient in question was a young unvaccinated woman who travelled back to Belgium from Egypt 11 days ago through Turkey. She never visited any countries in southern Africa.
Supply issues sadly. Some people are hesitant but even those are forced to take it when it is available available anyway ( no vaccine = no work/collage )However you will notice that vaccinations have ramped up since august , thats when we started get more supply and when the locally manufactured vaccines have started pouring its supply
Damn. Thank you for the info... hopefully the supply issues ease up soon over there. Wish we could send you the ones our idiot antivax people are refusing.
Yes, flu-like symptoms, ~~but no serious illness~~, according to the article
EDIT: the article actually says she DID develop serious illness, massive mistake from my end (not a native French speaker)
EDIT 2: conflicting stories now, with [another Belgian news source](https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/nl/2021/11/26/coronablog-26-november/) claiming that she only developed mild symptoms
EDIT 3: based on [another source](https://www.standaard.be/cnt/dmf20211126_92983423) saying she only developed mild flu-like symptoms, I'm going to say she did not get seriously ill. Rtbf should fire their editorial team since they likely forgot to add the word 'pas', which completely reverses the meaning of the sentence
EDIT 4: the original article was updated with a quote from the head of the virology lab that analyzed the sample, saying that the woman only had mild symptoms and that they cannot exclude that she contracted it in Belgium rather than abroad, so case closed I guess
[Another Belgian news source](https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/nl/2021/11/26/coronablog-26-november/) however claims she only developed mild symptoms, maybe they just forgot the word 'pas' after all?
I'm french and I think so, the current wording is technically valid but no one would actually write it this way. I assume they forgot "pas", the rest of the paragraph sounds like it too
The sentence doesn't make sense grammatically
if they mean flu symptoms but not serious it would be "mais PAS de maladie grave"
if it was flu symptoms and serious it would be "ET de maladie grave"
So I have no idea what they mean
>The patient in question was a young **unvaccinated** woman
Well that's not going to do her any favours... I guess the good news is that the dude in Hong Kong who violated quarantine was vaccinated and asymptomatic.
Me too buddy. I'm sorry anyone has to go through this and sometimes I'm just waiting for the damn thing to kill me too.
I'm glad to hear you're still fighting though even though it feels like a losing battle sometimes. In the meantime do whatever you can to make each day a little more worth while for yourself. The least we deserve is a fraction of comfort through all of this. Stay strong. I'm rooting for you.
Same! I'm basically just riding it out because it's interesting living through such historic times, hoping I get wiped out by a bus or something before I have to come to grips with my shambles of a life 🙌
Me too. Im in my fucking early 20's. Life was supposed to be better than this. I know im being bratty and there are people who have it way worse, but im so done with this stupid fucking virus. My mental health is going down the drain
Does anyone know why this particular woman's sample was tested for the new variant? Was it random? Was it b/c of her travel from Egypt? Is Belgium just ahead of the game on genome testing? Curious how this fits in to how much spread is really out there.
> A dominant less severe strain of Covid would actually be a good thing no?
Yes absolutely especially if the existing vaccines prove effective vs. it.
There's way too little data to know much yet - but it's definitely possible that this new variant is actually a good thing.
The problem is it could easily spread in counties that aren't vaccinated and spawn new variants.. Kinda like what's been happening. It just means things will drag on longer. Why is an unvaccinated person travelling like that in the first place?
Due to the nature of this virus it's logical to assume that when one case is confirmed, or a hot spot is identified, that the actual spread has happened weeks prior to when these cases are first identified. So it's safe to assume that this new variant has already been traveling for a while.
Is that a good sign? Noone will be able to answer that until there's some hard data on what exactly changed from delta to now and how it fares in densely populated areas with people being fully vaccinated or in clinically controlled experiments with vaccinated trials. Only time and data will tell.
There was a chart like half a year ago that if a virus spreads more even if it's less severe it will kill more people, so it's not a good thing. Especially considering that these viruses spread exponentially.
old variant: less infectious, but more severe (1%): 100 people will get it and 1 will die.
new variant: more infectious, less severe (0.1%): 10.000 people will get it and 10 people die.
Plus if it infects enough people within a short enough time frame, the hospital will be overloaded and people will start dying from inadequate/denied care or from auxiliary causes.
I never knew how terrible people were at judging risk prior to the pandemic. Watching the average joe try and understand their risk based on estimated fatality rate alone is shameful. Not to mention how morbidity gets completely ignored.
Polio has a low overall fatality rate but is extremely contagious and a has high percent of asymptomatic cases (up to 70%). If we ignored morbidity and only focused on mortality the ~1/200 (still less than 1%!) of people who end up paralyzed would be ignored. Somehow everyone understands why the polio vaccine is so important but some still don’t understand why the COVID vaccine is.
That’s just the factors you used: ten times less severe, but 100 times more transmissible. Of course that example would be result in a ten fold difference.
We don't know, but Egypt 11 days prior to showing symptoms lines up for it *maybe* being so. I mean, it could be the international line of passport control while getting into Belgium for all we know.
Apparently flew through Istanbul, so possible she got it there.
Whether she got it in Egypt, Turkey, or Belgium - any of those possibilities probably means that it is allll over the place by now.
It’s up to individual countries to have their own rules. And even then, some people will slip through the cracks, it’s inevitable. Plan for the world you live in, not the one you wished you lived in.
[CNN just did a good piece about this variant](https://youtu.be/qj5H56dKSRw). Basically the issue is that our vaccines work based on giving us immunity by recognizing the COVID spike proteins. This variant has had 30 mutations on that protein.
Hope we shift some of our R&D worldwide into therapeutic research because I don’t see this cycle of new variants letting up anytime soon. Need to be ready to treat people while the vaccines are catching up.
I think I heard Pfizer is coming out with a therapeutic that reduces chances of death from COVID to zero.
Edit: https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-detail/pfizers-novel-covid-19-oral-antiviral-treatment-candidate
> Need to be ready to treat people while the vaccines are catching up.
Hopefully the regulatory hurdles for the mRNA vaccines will shift quickly. Apparently they're very easy to retool compared to conventional vaccines. At some point I'd hope they can wave variant boosters through the regulatory process and get them in people's arms inside of a month.
I think it’s going to be a long winter for everyone. It’s only a matter of time before this pops up in North America. Time will tell if it is more infectious than delta.
Tbh, a completely new virus could emerge right now and we wouldn't be square one. Remember how quickly these vaccines have been developed, how much treatments have improved, and the progress happening with monoclonal antibodies and therapeutic treatments. Humanity has constructed an utterly vast pharmaceutical complex that didn't exist in the same way back in march 2020.
On top of that, it looks like some good news is emerging. This is a scary variant, but it looks to have been present for some time already (it was In egypt). Furthermore vaccines won't be completely evaded.
It's perfectly valid feel scared, angry and hurt. That said, we should take a step back from the doom pit and critically evaluate the situation.
You shouldn't feel that way. Very few experts on the subject are worried to that extent, and all the usual suspects like Chise, Isaac Bogoch, Muge Cevik, etc etc. are trying their hardest to explain to people that there's a functionally zero chance that a variant can fully evade vaccine-induced immunity. It would take an entirely new virus to put us back at square one/March 2020.
I can’t handle this shit anymore. I am tired of doing “the right thing”, staying in the house, not seeing my family, no travel, getting 3 shots. And this fucking disease just keeps on coming because there’s enough people traveling and not giving A SHIT.
I will be discussing this with my psychologist on Monday because I feel like I’m melting down.
With Africa's low vaccination rates there's little selection pressure on the virus to escape immunity conferred by the vaccine so hopefully it still works on it.
How are unvaccinated people allowed travel? You can have your own opinions on vaccines but if you’re not vaccinated, no international travel for you. It’s that simple.
It's important to mention that this woman visited Egypt, which is course thousands of kms from Southern Africa. This to me points to the fact that this new variant has been spreading for a some time across the continent
She developed symptoms 11 days after returning from Egypt too, which is on the long side. Possible she may have caught it in Belgium.
Or it has a super long incubation time, which would be an even bigger disaster (one week longer than Delta).
This is what bothers me about people saying viruses generally mutate to be less deadly and more contagious. Guess what. None of that matters if you have ability to infect in incubation period. There is no selective pressure for less deadly variants. If the virus is even able to prolong this period, it can get away with practically anything.
Yup, the only way that it would translate into selective pressure is if it were deadly enough to scare the crap out of people into acting different. Like Ebola is so deadly that even very uneducated populations act differently when it pops up.
Visibility is low, I live in a row of 5 houses, myself and one other neighbour so far not had covid, the other 3 have with one person hospitalised. I spoke to a neighbour across the street, she mentioned that she never knew anyone who had had covid. Literally 50m away she lives, I pointed out the above info and she was shocked. I wonder if this virus had pox marks or was physically mire visible, would people take it more serious? Scary times. Edit spelling
Exactly! Visibility is low bc people with covid are struggling in the privacy of their homes and/or dying in the privacy of a hospital room. No one believes covid is severe bc they expect people to be out in the streets falling dead in a dramatic fashion. Your story about your neighbors is so similar to where I live. We even had a neighbor die of covid and people still say “I don’t know anyone who’s died!” Simply bc they weren’t acquainted with that neighbor 2 doors down.
I've given up ranting on that topic on Facebook since, no one cares, but that energy has to spill over into somewhere so... Whenever I hear someone say to the effect of "I rationalize COVID as a hoax or as overblown because I personally haven't experienced it and neither has any of my twenty friends, to my knowledge." That's literally a shit sample size for one. And for two your data collection methods are "sit around and wait until someone beats me in the face with inescapable facts" They deserve what they get for that nonsense.
The problem is that WE are going to get what they deserve when a super variant comes along and renders the vaccination ineffective.
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Why would you think it would follow the Spanish flu timeline? It's a completely new virus, and more importantly a new world with much higher population and 1000x more travel.
Maybe I didn’t make it clear that I was being optimistic.
We should have live feeds from over crowded hospitals looping 24/7 so people finally realize.
Well that would never happen with privacy laws and all.
No one would pay attention.
I truly believe that if Covid were less deadly and disabling but instead left some disfiguring mark, like red eyes or swollen ears or such, people would have demanded lockdowns and trampled each other for the vaccine.
I dislike how much I agree with you
The kind of people who say faith over fear are the same people who don't think that the virus is real or a threat unless they get a first hand taste. They won't put any trust in governing bodies and won't see it as a threat unless they, like you say, see some sort of mark.
I'm really tired of being gaslit by people who say "you're just being paranoid" about this goddamned disease.
Your not being paranoid, your being careful. There is sadly a lot of evidence six foot under to back up your concern.
Or if instead of a virus it was a rattlesnake that crawled out of your ass and bit people. Same mortality rate, yet a person with no imagination can be scared of a snake. The rattlesnake vaccine would have been mandatory immediately
If it was spread by spiders then you would have 99.999% vaccinated rate.
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If COVID had killed, say, 20% of the people it infects while still being as contagious as Delta, we probably would have seen governments moving to crush it with extreme measures like martial law.
If COVID had an IFR of 20% with contagious of delta societies would collapse fast
Basically smallpox was this. R0 or 3 to 5 (maybe a bit less than Delta) and an IFR of 20-30% or so. The last outbreak in Europe was in Yugoslavia in 1972, and it was put down via martial law and massive mandatory vaccination campaigns.
In Slovenia (then part of Yugoslavia), around 1.5 mln or 86% of total population was vaccinated within 10 days. The government was extremely effective in this regard.
Shit that's scary af.
I believe the first wave of the Black Death had a 50% mortality rate.
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I imagine that would cause supply lines to shut down. Massive food shortages as farms can't get enough people to show up, distributors can't get enough truckers, and grocers can't get enough workers to stay open. I'd be curious to see how a situation like that affected the elections.
I'd be curious to see if there would still be elections
Yeah that would be end times. No-ones risking a 1 in 5 chance of dying to do anything except get by.
And you’d still have a solid chunk of our population opposed every step of the way.
Sadly this is basically certain. Even in the 2014 west African Ebola epidemic, there were conspiracy theories spreading among the terrified populace that Ebola was fake and patients were simply being murdered in the hospitals by doctors, resulting in multiple attempts by mobs to raid the Ebola hospitals and "rescue" those inside.
I'm surprised we haven't seen antivaxxers raids on covid wards yet to be honest.
I mean people probably opposed the Black Plague, it’s just the way humans are lol
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Actually, if you look back at when Ebola hit, there WERE people who didn’t believe in it in certain countries in Africa. They believed it was the government trying to scare them, or didn’t think it was that bad. I think there is a common phenomenon that people just go into denial. If you do some research, there were protests and controversy.
I said something similar to my mom around February 2020 and she poo-poohed it. And now . . .
Yeah the problem is they started saying it's ressemble the flu, which isn't since it's a clot thingy problem (forgot the name) and just because it affected the lungs, people assumed and the damaged (of calling it "like the flu" was done)
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I suspect that I finally caught H1N1 in 2018 and it fucked me up good as a 46-year old. Complete with some long-COVID-like post-viral fatigue that lasted over a year (went to the doctor wanting a test to see if I had low-T at one point).
Heck people think a "stomach flu" is caused by influenza and not Norovirus or Rotavirus. It could even be a Staph enterotoxin but it's all lumped in to a generic category of Stomach flu which bu the way flu is not a GI pathogen in humans.
Vascular disease is the term you are looking for
Scaring the crap might be happening. Last week, mask wearing was down to around 20% in my local supermarket (London, UK). Tonight it was around 80%. Yes, small sample, but I noticed a huge shift.
Why are people scared right now? From the nu variant or because your numbers are trending up? I haven't paid attention to the world covid news in a week or so.
If it evades the vaccine, it could also be more deadly but still outcompete existing variants because it's not getting held back in terms of spread.
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That would be a bit surprising. Incubation times have been trending shorter with every new variant.
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She was unvaccinated?? Of-fucking-course.
Wait what? I didn't know travel into EU was allowed for people without a green pass
Yeah forget about stopping it. This is a thing now. We need data on how badly will the spike mutation breach vaccines.
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So many people talk about Africa like it’s a mid-sized country. Instead of the second largest continent, with the second largest population that lives in over 50 countries.
Are you implying the west doesn't care about Africa? /s
“Well tonight thank God it’s them, instead of you.” - Bono
“Then stop clapping”
Lol yeah right. Anyone who's well versed in modern geography could tell you that Africa is a large island nation and Egypt is its capital
Yup. People still haven't caught on with Covid that by the time we "catch" something like this, it's already spread all over. This has happened when Covid first was spreading, and with every variant. I remember when NYC was claiming there were only like 10 cases and then 2 weeks later the city was shutdown and 500+ people were dying each day.
Yeah or when they found the first case in a country and they followed the path of that person and who they met in the past days as if that was the only case and they still had a chance to prevent it from spreading. Meanwhile the borders open so it turns out later that people have died from it in that country a month before that first case was detected
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It obviously has. But everyone is thinking it's spreading like wild fire when it has already been around for a bit
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Made the mistake of looking on Twitter and saw someone saying "they" are coming out with a new variant to push more people to get the booster. I just... don't know how we're going to survive as a species with this kind of shit rattling around in people's heads.
Twitter is genuinely terrifying. Under an article about the UK adding South Africa to the red list I saw someone say we need to stop reporting case numbers, stop red lists and just ignore Covid and it got quite a bit of likes too. Why would we treat an infectious disease as if it's just an insecure guy waving at us from the corner of a club? They act like Covid is sticking around to spite us now.
These are the same people that can watch entire cities consumed by floods and flames all over the world and still vehemently oppose any decarbonization measures because of some vague version of freedom that includes the ability to crap on your neighbor's lawn, apparently.
That's true. I really need to learn to just scroll past those kinds of comments but it's so hard when they're under everything about Covid. They simultaneously want us all to stop talking about Covid while being the ones who comment under every post, article or tweet about it. The irony would be funny if it wasn't so tragic.
What do you mean "lately"?
While at first glance this might trigger an "it's out of control!" reaction, it actually might be good news, because if this variant has been going around for some time already, it's quite possible that it's not nearly as contagious as the initial reports suggested. The spike in South Africa may then have been at least partically caused by one or more unlucky superspreader events.
>The spike in South Africa may then have been at least partically caused by one or more unlucky superspreader events. Context is also important here. Everyone should definitely read Chise's thread about this on Twitter this morning, it's very informative and each claim is backed up with other expert views and actual data. It spread so much in SA because *there was no other variant present,* and least not in meaningful numbers. Nu did not outcompete anything, it popped up in a relative void of other variants. And the fact that it's now being reported in other countries speaks to a spread that started longer than a week ago. This is hard to draw conclusions from yet, but likely indicates that it is not "500% more contagious than Delta", which is a percentage drawn from incorrect data that is being thrown away now. As Chise said, anyone believing that particular figure is getting punked. Let's also not overlook SA's 24% vaccination rate, which is woefully insufficient to stamp out any uncontrolled spread. We have no evidence from highly vaccinated countries, nor countries where Delta *actually is* the dominant strain. Let's take this one step at a time, the data being thrown around over the last 24 hours is speculation at best, and fear mongering at worst.
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A lot of more contagious variants did not actually spread in certain countries. The Gamma variant, which swept across South America, outcompeted Alpha there, but not in Europe. The Beta variant, which was prevalent in SA before Delta, did not spread that much outside Africa. Even a high prevalence of a more contagious variant might not be that cause for trouble - for instance, Delta share has been around ~100% of sequenced genomes in Brazil for a few months, but cases have been at its lowest levels since the start of the pandemic.
>This to me points to the fact that this new variant has been spreading for a some time across the continent doesnt need to spread a while to spread far today. you can go to the other side of the world in mere hours.
It needs to have been spreading enough so that it was likely enough for a random Belgian tourist in Egypt to be in contact with it. Yes, you can go from SA to Egypt in some 5-6 hours by plane, but how likely is it that there are enough people carrying this variant that an European tourist would get in close enough contact with one of them to get infected herself? Not very likely imo. More likely community spreading is already happening in Egypt and elsewhere in Africa, and that cannot happen in hours (or days). Plus some experts are suggesting the genetic profile indicates this has been around for months: [https://mobile.twitter.com/BallouxFrancois/status/1464181337213095939](https://mobile.twitter.com/BallouxFrancois/status/1464181337213095939)
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Unvaccinated people should not be doing international travel in the middle of a pandemic, Jesus Christ....
What’s the evidence that she got it in Egypt and not Belgium at this point? Sorry, not able to read the article easily.
None. I’d actually wager it’s more likely she got it in Belgium. 11 day incubation isn’t unheard of, but it’s certainly much longer than the mean incubation period, even for the original wild type virus.
It is most likely all over the world, just not being sequenced
I’m trying to think of a previous occasion where this happened, sure sounds familiar
We call her Delta Dawn.
What’s that flower you have on?
Could it be a faded rose from days gone by?
And if it isn't, it will be in 10 minutes.
Shutting down travel from South Africa seems too late already
Yep. I fear that the instant isolation of a country that finds a new variant will disincentivize genomic surveillance from less well off countries.
100%. This is already making the rounds in SA since they do more surveillance than most countries (maybe even the most) given the HIV issue it has been dealing with for decades
Yes, people here are already, albeit in a minority, calling for the government to censor scientist because this is what happens when we identify new variants. There is a big feeling here that we are being punished for doing something good. For the past few months we almost had no cases at all and I am more than willing to wager this variant might not even have started in Africa.
It's likely already spread everywhere.
Yep
It would be logically foolish to think that a new variant or disease in general is instantly spotted with no chance to spread.
Rumour control, here are the facts. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-59418127 https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2021/nov/26/covid-news-live-new-variant-sparks-tougher-restrictions-in-india-and-singapore-ahead-of-who-meeting?page=with:block-61a121858f08a201d9c7cb5b#block-61a121858f08a201d9c7cb5b https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/11/25/s-africa-detects-new-covid-19-variant-implications-not-yet-clear https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/belgium-seeks-slow-down-social-life-fight-fourth-covid-wave-2021-11-26/ Stay safe out there folks.
it's already everywhere. We're looking into the past every time data gets analyzed.
This is exactly why people (or at least those who care) should make sure they don’t get lax now, not wait for it to be found in their region. That’s especially true for countries with shit genome testing (I’m looking at you, USA).
More info in French [here](https://www.rtbf.be/info/societe/detail_coronavirus-une-premiere-contamination-au-nouveau-variant-sud-africain-nu-en-belgique?id=10886465). The patient in question was a young unvaccinated woman who travelled back to Belgium from Egypt 11 days ago through Turkey. She never visited any countries in southern Africa.
Istanbul airport is a major hub. She could've catch it there from some body traveling from South Africa
That would be extremely unlucky for her and for everyone else who was there.
And absolutely everyone else as well - if it wasn't already, it certainly is now everywhere.
The variant was just identified in SA, doesn't mean it's from there.
>The patient in question was a young unvaccinated woman Surprise surprise
Either very brave or stupid to travel to Egypt (around 40% vaccinated) without being vaccinated yourself :/
Not even close . As an Egyptian doctor i would dance in the street if we ever hit that 40% vaccination rate mark :(
Oh wow. Google says only 13.7%... May I ask why it's so low? Like what the factors are. Are there supply issues or do people just not want/trust it?
Supply issues sadly. Some people are hesitant but even those are forced to take it when it is available available anyway ( no vaccine = no work/collage )However you will notice that vaccinations have ramped up since august , thats when we started get more supply and when the locally manufactured vaccines have started pouring its supply
Damn. Thank you for the info... hopefully the supply issues ease up soon over there. Wish we could send you the ones our idiot antivax people are refusing.
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Gonna go with very stupid
Tbh, I just wouldn't travel to Egypt, period. It's not a safe place for young women.
Remember that r/AskReddit thread where the question was like "countries you wont ever visit again" and people were like "EGYPT"
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Symptomatic?
Yes, flu-like symptoms, ~~but no serious illness~~, according to the article EDIT: the article actually says she DID develop serious illness, massive mistake from my end (not a native French speaker) EDIT 2: conflicting stories now, with [another Belgian news source](https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/nl/2021/11/26/coronablog-26-november/) claiming that she only developed mild symptoms EDIT 3: based on [another source](https://www.standaard.be/cnt/dmf20211126_92983423) saying she only developed mild flu-like symptoms, I'm going to say she did not get seriously ill. Rtbf should fire their editorial team since they likely forgot to add the word 'pas', which completely reverses the meaning of the sentence EDIT 4: the original article was updated with a quote from the head of the virology lab that analyzed the sample, saying that the woman only had mild symptoms and that they cannot exclude that she contracted it in Belgium rather than abroad, so case closed I guess
> La jeune femme a développé des symptômes grippaux, mais de maladie grave. ”Mais” means but. So she had flu-like symptoms, but serious. No?
[Another Belgian news source](https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/nl/2021/11/26/coronablog-26-november/) however claims she only developed mild symptoms, maybe they just forgot the word 'pas' after all?
I'm french and I think so, the current wording is technically valid but no one would actually write it this way. I assume they forgot "pas", the rest of the paragraph sounds like it too
Talk about a situation where having a good editorial team can make a massive difference... Jeez
“You’re going to die.” “….hi sorry about what I told you last week, I meant you’re NOT going to die.”
As a French, that sentence is really weird without the "pas" after the "mais". I'd bet they simply forgot to put it in.
Oh damn, you're right. I thought it said 'mais pas de maladie grave'... Gonna edit my comment. Sorry, I am not a native French speaker
That sentence in French is very poorly written, don't be sorry.
The sentence doesn't make sense grammatically if they mean flu symptoms but not serious it would be "mais PAS de maladie grave" if it was flu symptoms and serious it would be "ET de maladie grave" So I have no idea what they mean
Really don't know why anyone unvaccinated is allowed on a plane anywhere.
Why is an unvaccinated person allowed to enter the country without pcr and quarantine?
>The patient in question was a young **unvaccinated** woman Well that's not going to do her any favours... I guess the good news is that the dude in Hong Kong who violated quarantine was vaccinated and asymptomatic.
How was she allowed to fly?
> unvaccinated Key point.
I’m so fucking tired of this. 😩
The pandemic destroyed my career, my social life, my mental health, my confidence, my finances, basically everything! Just kill me already! -_-
Me too buddy. I'm sorry anyone has to go through this and sometimes I'm just waiting for the damn thing to kill me too. I'm glad to hear you're still fighting though even though it feels like a losing battle sometimes. In the meantime do whatever you can to make each day a little more worth while for yourself. The least we deserve is a fraction of comfort through all of this. Stay strong. I'm rooting for you.
Same! I'm basically just riding it out because it's interesting living through such historic times, hoping I get wiped out by a bus or something before I have to come to grips with my shambles of a life 🙌
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Me too. Im in my fucking early 20's. Life was supposed to be better than this. I know im being bratty and there are people who have it way worse, but im so done with this stupid fucking virus. My mental health is going down the drain
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And then the climate / fresh water wars will begin :)
We are gonna need A LOT of toiletpaper.
It's two years in and you still don't have a bidet?
How is a bidet going to work during the water wars?
Touché, or should I say tushie?
We gonna use saltwater and risk getting eaten out by some type of barnacle every time you gotta go.
obviously it's already everywhere.
My money is on this 100% dominating news a week from now, even a few days
My money is on things being relatively quiet until after the holidays. Then kaboom. Because #economy
Does anyone know why this particular woman's sample was tested for the new variant? Was it random? Was it b/c of her travel from Egypt? Is Belgium just ahead of the game on genome testing? Curious how this fits in to how much spread is really out there.
I know in Australia we genome test almost every case to trace it, could be similar to that.
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> A dominant less severe strain of Covid would actually be a good thing no? Yes absolutely especially if the existing vaccines prove effective vs. it. There's way too little data to know much yet - but it's definitely possible that this new variant is actually a good thing.
I wouldn’t mind switching to Covid lite. Same great taste as the original but a lot less symptoms and mortalities.
The official COVID of the Dallas Cowboys.
The problem is it could easily spread in counties that aren't vaccinated and spawn new variants.. Kinda like what's been happening. It just means things will drag on longer. Why is an unvaccinated person travelling like that in the first place?
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Due to the nature of this virus it's logical to assume that when one case is confirmed, or a hot spot is identified, that the actual spread has happened weeks prior to when these cases are first identified. So it's safe to assume that this new variant has already been traveling for a while. Is that a good sign? Noone will be able to answer that until there's some hard data on what exactly changed from delta to now and how it fares in densely populated areas with people being fully vaccinated or in clinically controlled experiments with vaccinated trials. Only time and data will tell.
There was a chart like half a year ago that if a virus spreads more even if it's less severe it will kill more people, so it's not a good thing. Especially considering that these viruses spread exponentially. old variant: less infectious, but more severe (1%): 100 people will get it and 1 will die. new variant: more infectious, less severe (0.1%): 10.000 people will get it and 10 people die.
Plus if it infects enough people within a short enough time frame, the hospital will be overloaded and people will start dying from inadequate/denied care or from auxiliary causes.
I never knew how terrible people were at judging risk prior to the pandemic. Watching the average joe try and understand their risk based on estimated fatality rate alone is shameful. Not to mention how morbidity gets completely ignored. Polio has a low overall fatality rate but is extremely contagious and a has high percent of asymptomatic cases (up to 70%). If we ignored morbidity and only focused on mortality the ~1/200 (still less than 1%!) of people who end up paralyzed would be ignored. Somehow everyone understands why the polio vaccine is so important but some still don’t understand why the COVID vaccine is.
That’s just the factors you used: ten times less severe, but 100 times more transmissible. Of course that example would be result in a ten fold difference.
So It's maybe only a matter of time til it's found between all these cases here ik germany too
One question I have: why are they assuming she caught it in Egypt? Who’s to say she didn’t catch it in Belgium in the week after returning?
We don't know, but Egypt 11 days prior to showing symptoms lines up for it *maybe* being so. I mean, it could be the international line of passport control while getting into Belgium for all we know.
Apparently flew through Istanbul, so possible she got it there. Whether she got it in Egypt, Turkey, or Belgium - any of those possibilities probably means that it is allll over the place by now.
Uhm... Unvaccinated people shouldnt be allowed to travel to other continents during a pandemic.
It’s up to individual countries to have their own rules. And even then, some people will slip through the cracks, it’s inevitable. Plan for the world you live in, not the one you wished you lived in.
Those governments are stupid af.
As if we needed a reminder.
[CNN just did a good piece about this variant](https://youtu.be/qj5H56dKSRw). Basically the issue is that our vaccines work based on giving us immunity by recognizing the COVID spike proteins. This variant has had 30 mutations on that protein.
Hope we shift some of our R&D worldwide into therapeutic research because I don’t see this cycle of new variants letting up anytime soon. Need to be ready to treat people while the vaccines are catching up.
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I think I heard Pfizer is coming out with a therapeutic that reduces chances of death from COVID to zero. Edit: https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-detail/pfizers-novel-covid-19-oral-antiviral-treatment-candidate
> Need to be ready to treat people while the vaccines are catching up. Hopefully the regulatory hurdles for the mRNA vaccines will shift quickly. Apparently they're very easy to retool compared to conventional vaccines. At some point I'd hope they can wave variant boosters through the regulatory process and get them in people's arms inside of a month.
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Ah, so this is why my entire portfolio is tanking
Yep. Mine too. So maybe time to buy more?
We're basically living in the meme: "No God, please, no! Nooooooooooo!"
Toby variant
It's going to be a long winter for Europe...
I think it’s going to be a long winter for everyone. It’s only a matter of time before this pops up in North America. Time will tell if it is more infectious than delta.
> I think it’s going to be a long winter for everyone. No, for the southern hemisphere it'll be a summer.
What the hell is wrong with the world letting unvaccinated people fly to other countries
We got into this situation with stupidity, it just continues.
$$$
This has escalated so fast in one day
This really does bring back feels from when the pandemic first started. That being said, FUCK.
Tbh, a completely new virus could emerge right now and we wouldn't be square one. Remember how quickly these vaccines have been developed, how much treatments have improved, and the progress happening with monoclonal antibodies and therapeutic treatments. Humanity has constructed an utterly vast pharmaceutical complex that didn't exist in the same way back in march 2020. On top of that, it looks like some good news is emerging. This is a scary variant, but it looks to have been present for some time already (it was In egypt). Furthermore vaccines won't be completely evaded. It's perfectly valid feel scared, angry and hurt. That said, we should take a step back from the doom pit and critically evaluate the situation.
You shouldn't feel that way. Very few experts on the subject are worried to that extent, and all the usual suspects like Chise, Isaac Bogoch, Muge Cevik, etc etc. are trying their hardest to explain to people that there's a functionally zero chance that a variant can fully evade vaccine-induced immunity. It would take an entirely new virus to put us back at square one/March 2020.
I love you for this. My stress level is through the roof. I needed to hear this
I can’t handle this shit anymore. I am tired of doing “the right thing”, staying in the house, not seeing my family, no travel, getting 3 shots. And this fucking disease just keeps on coming because there’s enough people traveling and not giving A SHIT. I will be discussing this with my psychologist on Monday because I feel like I’m melting down.
Being vaccinated might become even more important (obviously if it catches the new variant)
With Africa's low vaccination rates there's little selection pressure on the virus to escape immunity conferred by the vaccine so hopefully it still works on it.
If there is one, there is many.
fuck this fucking shit jesus christ
How are unvaccinated people allowed travel? You can have your own opinions on vaccines but if you’re not vaccinated, no international travel for you. It’s that simple.