There’s a new variant in town. Or rather, a sub-variant – AY.4.2, an offshoot of the Delta variant, said by some scientists to be up to 10-15% more transmissible. As of the end of September it made up around 6% of new cases and is on an upward trajectory.
However, there’s no reason to panic – and, for a change, that’s the message coming from the top. The Prime Minister’s official spokesman said: “There’s no evidence to suggest that this variant… the AY.4.2 one… is more easily spread. There’s no evidence for that…”
Francois Balloux, Director of the University College London Genetics Institute, said while the variant is “likely to be up to 10% more transmissible”, it is not comparable to Delta when it arrived in the U.K, which was at least 50% more infectious than Alpha.
Professor Balloux played down the likely impact of the increased transmissibility on infections, adding:
Here we are dealing with a potential small increase in transmissibility that would not have a comparable impact on the pandemic… As AY.4.2 is still at fairly low frequency, a 10% increase in its transmissibility could have caused only a small number of additional cases. As such, it hasn’t been driving the recent increase in case numbers in the U.K.
AY.4.2 is not yet classed as a variant of concern, although it is being monitored by the U.K. Health Security Agency (the successor body to Public Health England) and “is likely to be elevated to the rank of ‘variant under investigation'”, Prof Balloux thinks.
It’s certainly good to hear the absence of panic. Professor Balloux is right to point out that a 10% increase in transmissibility is unlikely to make a noticeable impact on the spread. Technical Briefing 24 from UKHSA includes a graph showing the secondary attack rate (SAR, the proportion of contacts an infected person infects) of different variants over time. Splitting them into household and non-household contacts, it shows that Delta has hovered around the 10% mark for household SAR (and 5% for non-household SAR) since June. That means around 90% of people who live with an infected person do not become infected themselves (or rather, 90% of people who live with someone who is PCR-positive do not themselves report being PCR-positive).
A 10% increase in transmissibility would therefore equate to a household SAR of just 11% and a non-household SAR of 5.5%. That’s hardly going to make any difference, particularly as the SAR varies over time anyway.
As to the claim, repeated by Professor Balloux, that Delta is 50% more infectious than Alpha, it can’t be stressed often enough that this only holds when Delta first registered as a variant of concern in the spring (see graph above). At that point Alpha’s SAR had already declined (presumably due to variant-specific herd immunity and a change of season). The earliest reliable values for Delta household SAR put it around 14%. That is below the 15.5% direct-contact SAR recorded for Alpha using data up to December 20th 2020 in Technical Briefing 3, showing the two variants were comparable at their peak, with Alpha possibly having the edge (aided by winter). In the same briefing, Alpha is reported to be infecting 10-70% more contacts than the other (non-Alpha) strains around at the time. Again though, this is comparing the old variants which are in decline with the new variant which is surging. We don’t have SAR data for the original spring wave, but looking at the steep gradient on the infection curve in March 2020 we can be confident it was no lower than Alpha’s in December.
AY.4.2, on the other hand, is not currently showing any of this new-variant zing for infectiousness. In Denmark it reached a 2% frequency but then decreased. Until we see that change, it isn’t anything to get excited about.
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The real question here is: Why did Asian countries like Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan, who have much higher population densities than Western countries, have such low death tolls? Could it be that the reason is that they didn’t artificially inflate their numbers as part of a scaredemic?
All three countries have good reason not to trust China nor believe anything it says. They were also particularly speedy at closing their borders to China. And may already have had a lot of immunity in their populations due to previous exposure to SARS.
Japan’s population also in the main eats a better diet than most Western countries and although it has an elderly population they have high vitamin D levels and therefore their immune systems are well equipped to deal with a virus like SARS-COV-2.
Fair point.
More likely according to Yeadon is their prior exposure to SARS in 2003 giving their population natural immunity. This makes any comparison with Far East countries problematic imo
Fair point.
Comparisons between countries are fraught with difficulty – there are just too many variables involved (including data garbage).
Indeed. Another one of the many sins of govts everywhere is to have been complicit in generating more garbage data making it harder for anything useful to be discovered about covid – their claims to care about public health are hard to take seriously.
I read somewhere that Japan’s % of elders who are obese is minute (4%) compared to UK (29%) and New York (40%). Or something like that. Would be interesting to a graph worldwide plotting obesity rates vs covid deaths.
Yes I was about to say that. There simply are no fat people in Japan. I’ve travelled to Tokyo many times and the population is uniformly lean. It’s not possible to imagine without seeing it!
Sadly no matter what evidence is presented to them people like Ferguson, along with Bojo, Whitty, etc. are never going to admit they got it catastrophically wrong.
Or that they fudged the numbers in order to change the fabric of society?
Ferguson is famous for getting things catastrophically wrong, there is nobody better at turning a drama into a crisis. Yet even with his history of causing untold suffering with his ‘models’, there is absolutely no self-doubt or self-examination, where there should be massive guilt and shame there is arrogance and mis-placed confidence. And all under-scored and approved by Johnston.
It he worked in industry he’d have been sacked for gross incompetence.
However he might then have gone on to become a Consultant (seen it happen)
“…parameterising.”
Thus, not only does Ferguson do incalculable damage to the reputation of ‘modellers’, but to the English language, itself.
True.
Covid is itself a disease of language: safe, surge, social (as in ‘social distancing’), case… and dozens of other words that have been denatured and corrupted by Covid-cult liars.
What is clear is that Kneel is not a scientist but a politician. Lying dissembling, deceiving, calculating to protect himself and not a truth seeker.
Interesting to note, in the spreadsheet, that the lowest modelled numbers of infections/deaths for the UK are when enhanced social distancing of the elderly is implemented. Higher modelled numbers are given for social distancing of the whole population.
The Great Barrington Declaration suggested protecting the vulnerable. The Imperial modelling appears to be supporting that strategy.
Except in this paper
https://spiral.imperial.ac.uk:8443/bitstream/10044/1/77735/10/2020-03-26-COVID19-Report-12.pdf
… with this linked data
https://t.co/yBD0z5rhc4?amp=1
… on 2020-03-26, they made this set of predictions for Sweden.
https://twitter.com/PienaarJm/status/1400699456434102274/photo/1
…
Which forecast for “Enhanced social distancing of elderly” with an R of 2.4, which is what was sampled in Sweden, that there would be 16.1k deaths.
They’ve had 14.5k.
Why continually write articles, basically lying about people’s research?