Chat about Novel Coronavirus - 2019-nCoV - COVID-19

BoJo saying early day info points to new strain being approx. 70% more contagious...

Tier 4 announced. Restrictions are similar to November lockdown.

No overnight trips for Tier 4. Only essential international travel. National advisory against domestic travel. Non-essential businesses to close, WFH required if possible.

3 household rule is only on Christmas day now.

Did I just hear that the 5 day country-wide free-for-all has been reduced to 1 day (just Christmas day) regardless of what tier you're in?

Correct.

Yep. Unless you're tier 4, then it's stay at home with no visitors.

We’re in 3rd wave it seems. From 29 Nov - 15 Dec overall number of cases increased 50%. Hospital admissions from Sept to now show sharp increase in December. Generalised increase across the country, but particularly sharp in Tier 4.

Surely second wave still but just affecting different regions at different times.

I don’t believe this new variant bollocks and if it ain’t they should have been on top of this weeks ago.

I don’t believe this new variant bollocks and if it ain’t they should have been on top of this weeks ago.

They were apparently.

New variant was 28% of cases in the w/c 18th Nov.

Now ~60% in London and East of England.

"Back to normal by Christmas."

Yeah right.

We knew when he said it that it was bollocks. The question is why he didn't.

Boris was accusing kier starmer of threatening to cancel Xmas on 16th december.

I’ve just heard of new variant today. Would’ve been good to know it was 70% more transmissible when they found out weeks ago.

And maybe put London and se in tier 3 before Wednesday?

Surely second wave still but just affecting different regions at different times.

Technically? I don’t know. Looking at the graph, I guess it depends on whether you think the wave that caused Lockdown 2 went down far enough.

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Strong message calling for people not to leave Tier 4 in order to avoid potentially spreading more contagious strain to less-affected areas.

It probably took a while to work out that this new strain was genuinely more transmissible.

I imagine they are tracking a a large number of variants and have been from the Jan 2020.
It would be madness if they haven't accounted for the inevitable mutations.

This strain will be one of thousands of strains that have been detected, but the one that is now very rapidly becoming the dominant one.

Are the areas to be tier 4 still to be specified?

If you've been isolating, you can get to your mum without exposure, and you distance while you're there, the risk you present (to your mum and the general public) is fairly low. You are legally allowed to visit to take care of a vulnerable person and also to visit someone at end of life. The legalities don't fit every situation well.

There's no madness. Pretty much every infection is a variant of some description so they've been tracking thousands all this time. Just see how countries like Japan and Iceland are tracking pretty much every single infection by doing DNA analysis on each of them and seeing how it spread.

Whether a variant survives depends on lots of things.

A variant that is far more potent might not survive (in population terms) because people infected by it get sick quicker and isolate faster, therefore it spreads less. This is like Ebola, it's pretty lethal but it's hard to catch it if you avoid people who are actively sick.

The worst case is a mutation that means people are infectious for a long time and/or there is along delay between infection and getting sick.

Other countries have mentioned variants, Denmark in particular. It's not unique to the UK.

In 2 days time, we will hit the horrible milestone of 1 in 1000 people in the UK having died from Covid this year.

In context, thats the same odds as winning £12 in the Euromillions lottery.

Time to avoid the news and this thread again for a while, hope everyone is ok throughout the Xmas period!

I think I read that the WHO is aware of about 250k variants so far.