Covid19mathblog.com
Variant concerns growing – how the article is written – it leaves the reader with a perpetual income for vaccine makers as they play the cat and mouse game – vs. getting healthy – https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/01/27/961108577/why-scientists-are-very-worried-about-the-variant-from-brazil
“A variant called P.1, which emerged in early December in Manaus, Brazil, and by mid-January had already caused a massive resurgence in cases across the city of 2 million people.
On Monday, officials detected the first confirmed case of P.1 in the U.S., specifically in Minnesota. The state Department of Health picked up the case by randomly sequencing 50 nasal swabs from positive patients each week. The person infected with P.1. had previously traveled to Brazil.”
“virus expert Jeremy Luban at the University of Massachusetts told NPR two weeks ago before the variant arrived in the United States. "Manaus already had 75% of people infected [in the spring of last year]."
The concern with P.1 is twofold: Scientists don’t understand why the variant has spread so explosively in Brazil, and the variant carries a particularly dangerous set of mutations.”
“. In addition, Manaus had already been hit extremely hard by the virus in April. One study estimated that the population should have reached herd immunity and the virus shouldn’t be able to spread easily in the community. So why would the city see an even bigger surge 10 months later? Could P.1 be evading the antibodies made against the previous version of the virus, making reinfections easier? Could it just be significantly more contagious? Could both be true?
"While we don’t *know* exactly why this variant has been so apparently successful in Brazil, none of the explanations on the table are good," epidemiologist Bill Hanage at Harvard University wrote on Twitter.”
“the mutations are helping the virus evade antibodies or escape recognition by them. In essence, the mutations are providing the virus with a type of invisibility cloak.
To test out this hypothesis, Moore and her colleagues took blood serum from 44 people infected with the previous version of the virus and checked to see if the antibodies in that serum still worked against the new variant from South Africa. Or did the antibodies lose their sensitivity?
"Indeed that’s what we saw," she said. "In fact, it was really quite a dramatic drop-off in sensitivity. We saw that in half of the serum, the antibodies were significantly less effective against the new variant [from South Africa]." So far, scientists haven’t tested out P.1 in similar neutralization experiments, but P.1 has two mutations that scientists have already shown reduce antibody binding.”
“This process is going to cost the world a great deal of money — and take time, Gupta added. "I don’t think there’s going to be a single solution that just comes along in 2021 that says, ‘That’s it, we’re done.’
"The coronavirus is going to cause a long-term disruption."”
US deaths barely under 4K
TX leads in confirmation whereas CA leads in Death
LA county is leading in both categories again – but slowly coming back into line with other counties
Deaths for LA still resisting in coming down as confirmation fall dramatically for LA
It is interesting to note how well the NW US has done even though it was one of the beginning states plus they are generally colder up there.
