Emergence of a Deadly Coronavirus

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South African Variant

A worrisome new coronavirus variant first detected in South Africa, known as B.1.351, has already spread to more than 32 other countries including the U.S. Experts are particularly alarmed by this variant because of its potential to "escape" protection from current vaccines, meaning vaccines might not stop people from getting infected with COVID-19. This variant was first detected in Nelson Mandela Bay, South Africa, in early October 2020, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It took off rapidly, and within weeks it was the dominant strain in parts of the country. Now, South African officials are finding the variant in more than 90% of samples from COVID-19 patients that undergo genetic sequencing, according to The Washington Post.

Johnson & Johnson released new data on its COVID-19 vaccine candidate on Friday (Jan. 29) which showed that its vaccine was 72% effective in the U.S. and only 57% effective in South Africa, where the new variant is dominant, Live Science previously reported.

In addition, another vaccine maker, Novavax, released early results Thursday (Jan. 28) showing that its vaccine was nearly 85% effective against the so-called U.K. variant, but only 50% effective at preventing infection with the South African variant, Nature reported.

Moderna said that out of an abundance of caution, the company has started work on a "booster" vaccine dose against the South African variant, which could potentially be added to the two-dose series for the existing vaccine.

In the Novavax trial in South Africa, many of the people were reinfected with the South African variant after already contracting the virus earlier in the pandemic. And in a study of 44 people in South Africa who were previously infected with COVID-19 earlier in the pandemic, more than 90% showed reduced immunity against the new variant when researchers tested their blood, and nearly half had no protection against it, according to USA Today.

Source: South African coronavirus variant: All your questions answered

Watering Down the Vaccine

Infectious disease expert Michael Osterholm said on Sunday that the nation is facing a “Category 5” storm as the new and more infectious coronavirus variant first detected in the United Kingdom spreads in the United States. “We are going to see something like we have not seen yet in this country,” he said. Osterholm told NBC’s Chuck Todd on “Meet The Press” Sunday that Americans shouldn’t be fooled by the falling infection numbers.

Osterholm, who is director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota and who served on President Joe Biden’s COVID-19 advisory board during the transition, called for giving as many people as possible, especially older Americans, a single dose of the two-dose vaccines rather than ensuring everyone receives the full two doses on schedule.

Source: Infectious Disease Expert Warns ‘Category 5’ COVID-19 Hurricane Is About To Hit

From my perspective this is wrong from so many angles. This is not a scientific approach. Vaccines follow a very rigorous testing and scrutiny to ensure effectiveness and safety before they are approved. This testing is broken up into several phases: [see The 5 Stages of COVID-19 Vaccine Development: What You Need to Know]
Preclinical Stage: How will this vaccine work?
Phases 1, 2a, and 2b: Is it safe and what's the right dose?
Phase 3: How effective is the vaccine?
Phase 4: Regulatory approval and licensure - Is it ready for the world?
Phase 5: Will it stay safe down the road?
So if you implement a vaccination program that does not duplicate the testing regime, then you have significantly reduced the confidence that the vaccine will work. BECAUSE IT WAS NOT TESTED UNDER THOSE TEST REGIMES.

So after two very effective vaccines went through these test regimes, a variety of proposals have surfaced about altering the vaccination protocol on the fly. These included significantly expanding the time between the first and second dose, taking a mix and match approach [give a person one vaccine in the first dose and give them a different vaccine for the second dose] and now throw it all out the window and give them just one dose.

Giving a person one dose will not only cut the effectiveness of the vaccine but it may also reduce the length of time the vaccine protection will last. The Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines could offer immunity against COVID-19 for up to two to three years. But if you give only one dose, there is a real risk that the vaccine protection time will be significantly shortened.

Also integrate in the real world where variants of COVID begin to appear, such as the South African/Brazilian/U.K./California variants or some variant that has not yet appeared. A two dose regime of Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines appear to provide some reduced level of protection against the worst of these variants (South African variant) but if a person is only given a single dose, will the single dose provide any level protection at all.
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In a sense this whole thing reminds me of an condition that several Aspies experience called Agoraphobia.

Agoraphobia is a type of anxiety disorder in which an individual fears and avoids places or situations that might cause them to panic and feel trapped, helpless or embarrassed. They fear an actual or anticipated situation. These situations can include open spaces, public transit, shopping centers, being in a crowd, or simply being outside their home. The anxiety is caused by fear that there's no easy way to escape or get help if the anxiety intensifies. Most people who have agoraphobia develop it after having one or more panic attacks, causing them to worry about having another attack and avoid the places where it may happen again. People with agoraphobia often have a hard time feeling safe in any public place, especially where crowds gather. They may feel that they need a companion, such as a relative or friend, to go with them to public places. The fear can be so overwhelming that they may feel unable to even leave their home.

Those experiencing anxiety often focus on cognitive distortions; such as all-or-nothing thinking/polarized thinking, overgeneralization, mental filter, disqualifying the positive, jumping to conclusions (mind reading), jumping to conclusions (fortune telling), magnification (catastrophizing) or minimization, emotional reasoning, “should” statements, labeling and mislabeling, personalization, control fallacies, fallacy of fairness, fallacy of change, always being right, and heaven’s reward fallacy. For example, someone with panic disorder may engage in the distortion known as "catastrophizing", by predicting a negative outcome for an event that they don't yet know how it will turn out, this negative prediction can actually make it more likely that what you fear will happen.

Michael Osterholm doesn't know that the variants will produce a "Category 5" pandemic. He is focused on a negative outcome and his proposal of administering a single dose may in fact cause a "Category 5" pandemic next winter.

Progress of COVID Inoculations

According to the coronavirus vaccine tracker, the U.S. has now administered 32.84 million vaccine doses with around 10% of the U.S. population vaccinated (with at least one dose). In the United States 1.34 million doses are being injected daily.

Globally 101.33 million vaccine doses have been given with the U.S., China and U.K. in the top three positions.

Source: COVID-19 Vaccine Tracker

The Lunar New Year

Today marks the start of the world's largest human migration - an event which sees millions of people travel thousands of miles across China to reach home in time for the Lunar New Year. For some, it is the only time they will see their families all year and is an event not to be missed. This year's Chunyun begins on 28 January and will last until 8 March, giving people time to travel potentially thousands of miles across China in time for New Year, on 12 February, and back again. In a normal year, China sees around three billion trips during the Chunyun period.


Each year, millions in China make long journeys home during the Spring Festival

But there are fears the Spring Festival travel season, or Chunyun in Chinese, could become a superspreader event. After all, last year's Chunyun is believed to have played a significant role in the spread of Covid-19. In preparation for this, Beijing unveiled plans to vaccinate 50m people - or 3.5% of the population - before travel began in earnest. Three regions are in COVID lockdown.



For people in the affected cities, the message is clear - there will be no travelling for the Spring Festival this year.

Source: Chinese New Year: Clamping down on going home for the holidays

https://scitechdaily.com/air-purifiers- ... -covid-19/

The Lancet now reports that the Russian vaccine (Sputnik V) appears to be very effective against COVID (around 91.6 %), despite earlier criticism of lack of transparency and rushed development:

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)00234-8/fulltext
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)00191-4/fulltext

Not surprised. Russia has excellent scientists and completely unreliable officials.

Very, very bad news:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/ ... 1612265479

That's the Eastern curse.

I looked at the article and it contained a key paragraph that read:

The study looked at the role of an air purifier, considering only the air intake and exhaust associated with the purifier, but not the mechanism inside the purifier that kills the virus. Even with an air purifier in place, airborne virus transmission is still significant.

So if you ignore the fact that the purifier kills the viruses passing through it, then the study is very distorted. It might be akin to an automotive magazine evaluating a cars performance but first they pull out the engine and set it aside.

Last edited by jimmy m on 02 Feb 2021, 2:32 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I suspect that when the dust settles, monoclonal antibodies will still work but you must match the strains. A person with the South African variant must be matched to monoclonal antibodies from that particular strain. The generic strain will not be effective.

Progress of COVID Inoculations

According to the coronavirus vaccine tracker, the U.S. has now administered 33.7 million vaccine doses with around 10% of the U.S. population vaccinated (with at least one dose). During the last week in the United States averaged 1.32 million doses being injected daily.

Globally 104 million vaccine doses have been given with the U.S., China and U.K. in the top three positions.

Source: COVID-19 Vaccine Tracker

Where are we at and Where should we go?

We are over a year into this pandemic. So I thought I might give my observations.

This is a graph of Short Term Mortality Fluctuations for the United States.



It compares the death rate in the U.S by week during the pandemic with the average weekly death rate between the reference years 2013 and 2019.

Source: Short-term Mortality Fluctuations

This graph is a good indicator of the impact of the pandemic on the mortality rate in the U.S.

This pandemic comes in waves. The largest waves occur during the winter seasons. But between the winter months there are still infections taking place and some people are dying just not to the extremes. There is a smaller summer peak. The coronavirus pandemic is a seasonal pandemic in some ways similar to the influenza.

So unless the pandemic is brought under control, I would expect this graph for 2021 to be similar to 2020. There will be a major third wave next winter. (and in my opinion this wave will be driven by the variants)

Vaccines have been developed in record time and currently people are being immunized. But variants of the virus have appeared (the U.K. variant, the South Africa variant, the Brazilian variant, the California variant). Other variants will appear as the year goes by. Many of these variants are highly contagious and rapidly replace the original version of COVID-19 and become dominant clusters. Some of these variants are deadlier. Some have resistance to the various vaccines that are being developed. The mRNA type vaccines (Pfizer and Moderna) appear to have the highest effectiveness against the variants thus far.

So what should we be doing?

First of all, recognize this virus is spread by aerosols and that we should incorporate the best tools available to control this transmission route. This includes wearing better facemarks (N95's) indoors, applying ventilation standards indoors, treating the indoor air with UVC sanitizers installed the the HVAC systems, using HEPA type filtration to remove the indoor viral particles and maintaining indoor humidity levels between 40% and 60% RH.

Second, begin a crash program to develop a vaccine booster to strengthen the immunity against these new variants with a goal of making these booster shots available in the Fall.

Coronavirus Variants

Drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline said Wednesday it will work with a German biopharmaceutical company to develop new vaccines targeting emerging variants of COVID-19 amid concerns that some mutations are making the virus harder to combat. GSK plans to invest 150 million euros ($181 million) to support the research of the Tubingen, Germany-based CureVac, which is developing vaccines that use messenger RNA to attack the disease.

Public health officials are concerned about the variant first identified in South Africa because it contains a mutation of the virus’ characteristic spike protein targeted by existing vaccines. The mutation may mean the vaccines offer less protection against the variant.

"The increase in emerging variants with the potential to reduce the efficacy of first-generation COVID-19 vaccines requires acceleration of efforts to develop vaccines against new variants to keep one step ahead of the pandemic,’’ the companies said in a statement.

Source: GSK, CureVac to make COVID-19 vaccines aimed at new variants

Progress of COVID Inoculations

According to the coronavirus vaccine tracker, the U.S. has now administered 34.99 million vaccine doses with around 10.6% of the U.S. population vaccinated (with at least one dose). During the last week in the United States averaged 1.34 million doses being injected daily.

Globally 108.12 million vaccine doses have been given with the U.S., China and U.K. in the top three positions.

Source: COVID-19 Vaccine Tracker

Deadly variants will increase spread and the transmission of the deadly virus.
New strains are unlikely to be slowed down by vaccines or treatments.
The vaccines were made to deal with the classic COVID-19.
Vaccines were not made to deal with the UK, Brazil and South African strains.
New strains will result in more cases and more deaths as the virus spreads.