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Re: Coronavirus
The most important thing right now is that people don't knee jerk.
Keep on with what we are doing. This variant hasn't (as far as we know) hit the UK but they all have, some have taken off, some like Beta haven't. If you have covid symptoms isolate and get a test.
Pretty much all the infections so far have been linked with travel to Africa, the vast majority southern Africa. The flight from SA to NL with people testing positive will be isolated and NL is in lockdown anyway, which will help.
We don't know much yet about whether the variant is more transmissible than Delta, to what extent it is or not, and to what extent it may be able to evade immunity. We don't know if it is going to take off in an environment with a high amount of infection with another variant. This will likely be tested with the EU countries who have already seen it.
At the moment a lot of SAGE advisors including Whitty himself are saying it's not something to get worried about yet. If it does take off it will probably affect unvaccinated people more easily so that is probably the important thing.
Moderna and Pfizer have said it would be only a few weeks if they needed to produce a new version of the jab to use, so that will be covered if it's the only way out.
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