servodude wrote:servodude wrote:Surely the Tanzanian government must be ranking worse than Brazil now?
- sd
A novel variant of interest of SARS-CoV-2 with multiple spike mutations detected through travel surveillance in AfricaThis new VOI, temporarily designated A.VOI.V2, has 31 amino acid substitutions (11 in spike) and three deletions (all in spike). The spike mutations include three substitutions in the receptor-binding domain (R346K, T478R and E484K); five substitutions and three deletions in the N-terminal domain, some of which are within the antigenic supersite; and two substitutions adjacent to the S1/S2 cleavage site. Several of these mutations are present in other VOCs/VOIs and are evolving under positive selectionFound in Angola from people who travelled from Tanzania
so that's 34 total mutations - 14 in spike (including the E484K)
compared to:
- 17 total (8 spike) for the UK variant
- 18 total (10 spike) for the Brazil variant
I think we should level up a bit more for the boss fight
-sd
Yes. Not knowing a huge amount about it that does still seem concerning simply on the "that number is bigger than that number" basis. One long expert interview I saw with a US immunologist said that there are currently two schools of thought amongst the expert (immunologists and virologists) community. One school of thought is that mutations will be an ongoing thing and we'll end up in a similar situation as we have with the Flu, namely annual booster shots to address the constant flow of new variants. The other more encouraging school of thought is that the number of viable mutations available to the SARS-CoV-2 virus is limited, that it might have already "played its best cards", and that one more round of boosters to address various common specific mutations that have arisen (e.g. the E484K-carrying mutations) might be all that is needed plus potential top-ups depending on the duration of vaccine-induced immunity. The last school of thought draws on the independent emergence of various specific mutations such as E484K.
I was already a bit disappointed yesterday to see that one mutation in this new Indian strain is E484Q so a K amino acid substitution clearly wasn't the only viable spike mutation at position 484 and the virus has now been seen to be viable with at least 3 different amino acids at that position (E, K and Q). There are still another 19 left in the standard RNA coding list although hopefully some or all of those are unviable. The E484Q extremely viable (based on the "success" of the Indian variant) mutation plus seeing so many additional individual mutations surviving in the A.VOI.V2 variant does make one wonder if that "the virus has already played its best cards" school of thought might be overly optimistic and becoming increasingly undermined by new evidence.
I tend to agree with you that maybe we should level up a bit before the boss fight but if we're willing to make an in-game purchase this weapon might help if it works ...
Using a new platform, scientists have developed a Covid-19 vaccine that they say could offer protection against not only existing and future strains of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, but also other coronaviruses. The vaccine is cheap, at $1 a dose, and has shown promising results in early animal testing, the researchers have reported in the journal PNAS.
...
The vaccine, created by Zeichner and Virgina Tech’s Dr Xiang-Jin Meng, targets a part of the virus’s spike protein called the fusion peptide. This compound is essentially universal among coronaviruses, and has not been observed to differ at all in the many genetic sequences of SARS-CoV-2 obtained from around the world, the researchers said.
...
[ Source:
https://indianexpress.com/article/expla ... s-7282248/Or as a more general brief discussion of the search for a universal vaccine -
https://www.news-medical.net/health/The ... ccine.aspxWe still really do have a lot more opportunity to "science the sh*t" out of this (to quote a line from "The Martian"). This is all very much still a work in progress which is why I think we still need some non-pharmaceutical interventions in place for a while yet. Definitely not to the extent of draconian lockdowns, at least not in light of current efficacy of vaccines against currently prevalent variants in the UK, but please let's take contact tracing seriously while numbers are low, let's have more research, initiatives and government advice on internal air quality, and I'm sure there are many other aspects of NPI that could be explored or left in place at least for the next 6-9 months or so that wouldn't massively impact the economy & personal freedoms but wouldn't signal an "it's all over, we can let our guard down completely" attitude that might well come back to bite us.
- Julian