Idk why I’m writing this post but I just received my positive COVID test. I’ve been quarantining for the last 13 days due to a roommate testing positive. Now, I’m stuck in isolation for 10 more. I just feel fucking defeated. The world is ending. The state is collapsing. Everybody’s dying of a pandemic. We are so fucking abandoned. And I can’t even leave my room for the little bit of personal contact still allowed during COVID.
Thanks for being a place that I can come scream into the void, chapochat. I feel like less of a tinfoil hat wearing lunatic when I’m surrounded by my fellow lunatics.
To be clear though, that G614 mutation was first spotted in China in January 2020, and then spread to Europe.
(within China itself the G614 strain was soon wiped out)
Maybe like India numbers.
The problem was not so much EU/USA failing to shut borders soon enough, but also failing to quarantine travelers, then failing again with mask policy, failing again with delayed lockdowns, and so on.
Viral strain had nothing much to do with it, the response was terrible either way. Asia has that same G614 strain too, but they have been able to keep it mostly under control.
I'm sorry but this is just factually untrue. Even the twitter thread you linked posts no rebuttal against this, and it predates this news.
If the European strain arose in China and colonized Europe via a founder event, it still doesn't change the fact that it's 10x more contagious and better at infecting cells. Again, that its 10x more contagious is a scientifically established fact.
https://www.scripps.edu/_files/pdfs/news-and-events/The%20D614G%20mutation%20in%20the%20SARS-CoV-2%20spike%20protein%20reduces%20S1.pdf
I'll give you that the strain arose in China--but didn't spread there at all because all the human real estate was taken up by other strains, the viral competition was too high. It spread very quickly in the West because of a lack of similar viruses.
This also lends credence to the idea that being asymptomatically exposed to the Chinese strain renders immunity to the deadlier Western one. Else we should've seen a huge Italy-style outbreak in China.
The logic behind my post still remains sound, the epidemic could have been lessened by letting in the benign Chinese and shutting out everyone else--though I wouldn't expect this level of prediction, I'd just expect a simple shutdown of all travel and quarantining all returnees (which as you said the west also failed at)
Viral strain is why Aus and NZ have virtually no corona problem compared to the rest of west, even though they're literally USA 2.0 with pro-coal anti-mask karens and tuckers. It's ALL about viral strain, as well as the policies which have helped the Western strain propagate while shutting out the Chinese one (aka chynabad-ism). Aus benefitted by being close to China--of course NOBODY will ever admit that in the media or on reddit or anywhere else. But it's a fact.
Yes, of course mask wearing reduces transmission. Asia was unscathed because they had a 10x more harmless virus, and also because they parttake in behavior that makes the virus 10x less likely to spread. Hence why their death counts are 100x lower. (Aus/NZ are 10x lower)
This is fascinating and the first I've heard of it. So basically, the reason the virus is so bad in the West is that the Asians were already immune to 19 because they'd been infected with a less harmful strain and so had the antibodies to fight off 19? Sorry, I'm kinda slow.
That's what the situation is increasingly looking like, yes. The Western virus is 10x more contagious. Despite this, the Western virus actually arose in China, but somehow just didn't spread there. Why didn't it spread if it's so contagious?
Answer is they're probably all immune via getting the milder earlier version.
Again, I'm not a scientist, but I've been right about virtually everything about this virus since March, just by looking at publicly available population stats and talking to people.
And again, you will NEVER hear about this outside of this website, due to chynabadism.
That is not an if.
No. It is ten times more infectious within cell cultures.
It is not ten times more contagious; that is fundamentally not how infectious diseases work.
That would require people somehow coughing and meeting people maybe ten times as much.
Biospace is not a journal. That preprint article (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7310631) is likely reputable but it makes no claims about contagion.
Some hack journos took 10x infectivity and ran that as 10x more contagious, and here a random news article debunking it.
The cause of these differences is due to policy, culture, and geography, and in that regard New Zealand is nothing like the USA.
I was using 'if' in the rhetorical sense. I literally said you were right.
Yeah, it's 10x more infectious in cell cultures, and the areas that had the virus also mysteriously have 10x fewer deaths (100x fewer in Asia where they do masks). Definitely a nothingburger
Ok, you're legitimately correct here, I took that article at its word and I was wrong. The actual paper says the following:
So you're right, it's not more contagious, it's just more stable during the process of infection (less likely to break off or something). The end effect is that it is 10x more infectious. Again, I was technically wrong, but how does this change literally anything about my larger point, which was that the Euro strain causes 10x more deaths?
They also seem to agree that this strain is more fit and explains the higher deaths/capita:
Ok, now do Australia. Why are the cunts at 31 deaths while the bongs, their literal twins, are at 630 (per million)?
The points on which I object are that simplistic 10x idea (how does that even operate over time, since viruses grow exponentially?)
And that countries in Asia-Pacific mostly avoided deaths because it was a weaker strain; rather than effective crisis response.
(Nature paper below concerns data until 3rd of July)
So the first aspect is case fatality/mortality rate.
This figure is a decent summary of that topic: https://www.nature.com/articles/s10038-020-0808-9/figures/1
There are roughly 3 genetic clusters of the virus. If you look at the worst performing countries (highest points) we can see that the red/blue clusters (that contain G614) are about 3x more deadly. (or 2x when comparing means instead)
More important is the amount of spread within those clusters. Within the red cluster for example, there is one country with about 15% case fatality rate, and another around 0%.
The point is, the virulence of it hardly even matters, because countries that do well completely wreck this virus anyway.
As you can see from that figure, the viral gene profile of Australia is mostly the same as the USA. (except that Australia has encountered a somewhat greater variety of mutations)
And the prevailing blue cluster in the USA is clearly milder than the red one in Brazil, Italy, or Iceland.
You're not entirely wrong about the bigger picture, it is just extremely misleading to use that 10x number, and to ignore the fact that variation between countries is so much larger than between strains.
This even clearer in this next figure from the same paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s10038-020-0808-9/figures/2
The second part is the total number of infections that are allowed to happen, that one would expect to increase with contagion.
And to that end: https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(20)30820-5 (with data until March 20th)
It shows that G614 (and total 3 out of 4 mutations define the 'G clade') originated in China; but that 4th 'G clade' mutation likely first occurred in Italy. (not that it really matters, these mutations were basically inevitable)
This 'G clade' soon dominates over the 'D clade'. There likely is increased contagion/transmissibility, but there are multiple mechanisms by which relative fitness could operate.
If it were possible to conclude increased contagion from the available data, that paper would already be doing so with great enthusiasm.
And again this paper shows that "G clade" exists in both Australia and USA in comparable ratios at the same time.
D614 initially dominated in both, but was soon displaced by G614.
And yet Australia did okayish, while the USA did not.
There are many ways to try and explain that; but viral strain (while I cannot entirely rule it out here) seems unlikely to be that significant.
I mean really, do people forget the insane lengths that China went to?
Who cares if they were even spraying disinfectant; it could have been straight up steam machines and saved thousands of lives just by scaring the shit out of people.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBlV4tTRxFY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLdwCdyiDCw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_paSG16bWg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWqCUpKTUa8
Sorry, I don't know when to quit.
And have too much time on my hands apparently.