Coronavirus

[daveeb]

Originally Posted by jfman

The irony.

https://www.cableforum.uk/board/show...postcount=8162

Content to dish out sarcastic insults but unable to take them in return.

We all know you have no papers published but thanks for the clarification. As you tell us often enough you don’t care about the subject matter so it’s impossible to imagine you’d devote such time typing away at a keyboard about it. Beyond your extensive and insightful engagement with this thread of course!

In response to your post however I will acknowledge your familiarity with being wrong about everything. So ianch99 should give your post some weight on that basis.

Don't forget that last Christmas he had dinner guests who, he assured us, were all completely safe and posed no threat presumably due to his deep insights into the virus and how it's propogated. I suspect he's too modest to reveal where these revelations come from, and the complexity of the information is probably beyond our basic understanding.

[Pierre]

Originally Posted by daveeb

and the complexity of the information is probably beyond our basic understanding.

Got it in one Dave.

[ianch99]

Originally Posted by nffc

Going back to the paper Paul amongst others have said was nonsense.


It is only looking at it with the benefit of hindsight that we can of course reach this conclusion.


By this stage we knew similar to what we do now. The virus was still out there, still circulating at higher levels, and we'd still been vaccinating as many people as we could.



We knew the vaccines would probably hold out against hospitalisations but there wasn't enough data to know this for sure with Delta, that was presumably the main point of the 3 week delay, but the intention to open up provided nothing went horribly wrong was probably always there once Hancock was replaced.

It was a calculated risk but let's not forget the timing also coincided with school closures which would in itself have reduced spread of the virus in an environment where not only most people weren't vaccinated (and still aren't) but also spent a long time together in the same room. It's still likely the case if a kid turns up to school with covid that most of the class will get it, those who haven't already, that is (and this is where it will end). The fact spread amongst adults with everything open didn't then kick off at all implies that the vaccines are holding it enough, and that the measures may not have been as effective as you think.

It is true that a virus with a more transmissible advantage selectively will out compete and if something like Beta developed the transmissibility of Delta with the vaccine escape as well, then you would be looking at trouble, but this doesn't seem to be showing any signs of happening, in fact it's probably slowing down a bit on that since we had Alpha come up about this time last year and then in the spring we had Delta and not really much since (this Delta plus just seems to be a more transmissible version of Delta), and we're not actually seeing other variants able to out compete them. Again this is a fact we didn't know then, didn't know that is how it would turn out, and the risks mentioned were possible.


You can't look back at predictions really with the benefit of hindsight - 3 weeks to protect the NHS.

Just wondering if you even read my post? I was specifically referring to the possibility of vaccine escape in a highly infected, mostly vaccinated population. This is still a concern today ..

---------- Post added at 14:12 ---------- Previous post was at 14:04 ----------

Originally Posted by Pierre

Got it in one Dave.

So if this is beyond even your basic understanding, as you put it, I am surprised you can completely dismiss a paper published in Nature as "bollocks" and have any credibility.

[jfman]

I’m quite sure the credibility boat sailed sometime between this post

https://www.cableforum.uk/board/show...&postcount=118

And now.

[Pierre]

Originally Posted by ianch99

So if this is beyond even your basic understanding, as you put it, I am surprised you can completely dismiss a paper published in Nature as "bollocks" and have any credibility.

You need to re-read what Dave said and what I said. I didn't say it was beyond "my" basic understanding.

If anything point proven.

---------- Post added at 15:41 ---------- Previous post was at 15:40 ----------

Originally Posted by jfman

I’m quite sure the credibility boat sailed sometime between this post

https://www.cableforum.uk/board/show...&postcount=118

And now.

At least I have a boat.

[Carth]

credibility

odd word to use in a 550 page thread full of guesswork and piss poor planning

[nffc]

Originally Posted by ianch99

Just wondering if you even read my post? I was specifically referring to the possibility of vaccine escape in a highly infected, mostly vaccinated population. This is still a concern today ..

It will be anyway. But whilst it doesn't exist we need not concern ourselves with it.


Considering for this to happen, you would need vaccine escape through a new variant which can evade the vaccine immunity, and this would also likely evade the immunity from infection with other variants, it would also need the transmissibility advantage over delta, so it would need to be basically delta with immunity escape. We did of course have a variant which could evade previous infection and immunity from vaccines but it lost out and doesn't really circulate any more.



The vaccines worked against the original virus, they worked against Alpha, they work slightly less against Delta but still work, perhaps not as much against Beta, but 2 doses of either AZ or Pfizer is enough to keep most people out of hospital even if they do get the virus.


A new variant could still throw that out the window but could at any time. If everyone was either vaccinated or had it, if a new variant evolved here or anywhere, then if it could defeat that then everyone would go back to being vulnerable again. But that hasn't happened yet, wasn't on the cards as any more than a hypothetical risk then as much as now, and stands as much chance of coming in from outside the country via travel as it does starting up here to begin with.

[Pierre]

Originally Posted by jfman

Well at least you’ve conceded your understanding is basic.

where?

Congratulations on returning to having the second most posts in the thread btw. It’s touch and go with Hugh but deep down I think you care about this more than he does.

Oh, I don't know, some of it is interesting, some of it is sport.

[jfman]

Originally Posted by nffc

Considering for this to happen, you would need vaccine escape through a new variant which can evade the vaccine immunity, and this would also likely evade the immunity from infection with other variants, it would also need the transmissibility advantage over delta, so it would need to be basically delta with immunity escape. We did of course have a variant which could evade previous infection and immunity from vaccines but it lost out and doesn't really circulate any more.

So basically it needs to be able to do to Delta what Delta did to Alpha?

It doesn’t strike me as particularly unconcerning, given infinite time and billions of opportunities against weakening efficacy (all vaccines).

[TheDaddy]

Originally Posted by nffc

It will be anyway. But whilst it doesn't exist we need not concern ourselves with it.


Considering for this to happen, you would need vaccine escape through a new variant which can evade the vaccine immunity, and this would also likely evade the immunity from infection with other variants, it would also need the transmissibility advantage over delta, so it would need to be basically delta with immunity escape. We did of course have a variant which could evade previous infection and immunity from vaccines but it lost out and doesn't really circulate any more.



The vaccines worked against the original virus, they worked against Alpha, they work slightly less against Delta but still work, perhaps not as much against Beta, but 2 doses of either AZ or Pfizer is enough to keep most people out of hospital even if they do get the virus.


A new variant could still throw that out the window but could at any time. If everyone was either vaccinated or had it, if a new variant evolved here or anywhere, then if it could defeat that then everyone would go back to being vulnerable again. But that hasn't happened yet, wasn't on the cards as any more than a hypothetical risk then as much as now, and stands as much chance of coming in from outside the country via travel as it does starting up here to begin with.

I remember some egg head saying it would have to evolve into something completely new like covid 22 or something for it to be able to completely evade the vaccines, was he wrong

Originally Posted by TheDaddy

I remember some egg head saying it would have to evolve into something completely new like covid 22 or something for it to be able to completely evade the vaccines, was he wrong

No, he wasn’t. Covid vaccines target the spike protein, which while it can mutate, has a finite number of forms it can take, and they all overlap to a greater or lesser degree. As far as we presently know, any vaccine will have a certain level of effectiveness against any variation of that spike protein. Mind you, in certain cases that effectiveness could be quite low, so I don’t know how useful an observation that is.

[nffc]

Originally Posted by jfman

So basically it needs to be able to do to Delta what Delta did to Alpha?

It doesn’t strike me as particularly unconcerning, given infinite time and billions of opportunities against weakening efficacy (all vaccines).

sort of.


But Delta is fundamentally a more transmissible Alpha, which is only concerning to a certain extent - if the disease is the same, but just spreads quicker/easier, then that just means if you need to slow it down you need to do more.


There's slight immunity escape too but what you'd probably need is for something like Delta and Beta to fuse which would give the transmissibility and vaccine escape. But given that this would be a logical next stage in the virus, there has to be some reason why it hasn't done this yet (and why in these cases Beta has just lost out) - probably because there's only so many big mutations the spike proteins can take before they don't actually do their job (don't forget this is how the virus enters its code into cells) and in these cases the choice between transmissibility and other issues seems to always go with transmissibility.


It seems possible we won't see it - we probably would have by now. Everything just seems to be getting more transmissible and less asymptomatic but milder symptoms more like a cold, which could well be how the coronaviruses which caused colds ended up that way.

[jonbxx]

Some great explanations of virus evolution here, in particular that mutations have no intelligence and are random. If one thing as come out of all this, it's we all know a lot more about virology and genetics than we did a couple of years ago.

The immune response to the vaccines (or indeed infection) work in two ways. Antibodies to the part of the spike that binds the cells being infected will block that binding (neutralising antibodies) Antibodies that bind anywhere else on the spike protein 'tag' the virus for destruction but don't stop it infecting cells. Neutralising antibodies are definitely our friends here as they both block infections but also do this immune system tagging.

As nffc said, if the binding site of the spike changes enough to evade antibodies, the hope is that these will not be effective virus. The delta variant was fun as neutralising antibodies don't bind as well but the spike protein binds better to the cells it wants to infect. Luckily both of these effects were small enough that it was a complete disaster.

[ianch99]

Here's another useless paper in the Lancet talking about the risk of vaccine escape:

SARS-CoV-2 incidence and vaccine escape

Despite its simplicity, our quantitative illustration demonstrates that strategies for mitigating the vaccine escape risk should be explored. Reducing case numbers locally should be only one element of these strategies. Travel restrictions to reduce the risk of importing novel variants should be considered. We recognise that assessing the escape variant emergence risk not only requires the variant to arise via mutation as considered here, but also to grow to appreciable frequencies. This is a stochastic process, depending on the availability of hosts to infect and the escape variant's fitness. A reduction in cases leads to both a reduction in the risk of escape variants appearing and a reduction in their subsequent establishment via transmission in the population. Acquisition of additional mutations that are beneficial for the virus is also more likely to be suppressed if incidence is reduced.

In summary, high SARS-CoV-2 incidence rates act to increase the vaccine escape risk. Maintaining low case numbers using NPIs and vaccines is crucial at this time.

All authors report being members of the Joint Universities Pandemic and Epidemiological Research consortium (JUNIPER) and participants of the UK Government's Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling, Operational subgroup (SPI-M)

[Pierre]

Originally Posted by ianch99

Here's another useless paper in the Lancet talking about the risk of vaccine escape:

SARS-CoV-2 incidence and vaccine escape



I am really tempted to tell these learned folks that they have really wasted their careers. All they needed to do was to come to Cable Forum and listen to the resident experts here. It would have been a lot easier for them

That’s a good article, it doesn’t contain incorrect forecasts and sensationalist hyperbole.

I knew you’d come through in the end.