[petejh]

The best case is that you and Ali are absolutely correct in your cynicism (better posted on the covid & politics thread?) that this is all just a government ploy to ‘cover their arses over not cancelling xmas earlier’.

The much worse case is that there actually IS a much more virulent strain of covid spreading uncontrollably across the UK.

I wish that you were correct, but the facts suggest that you’re completely wrong.

My cynically mind sees this the other way round entirely. As much as I think our government is incompetent at times on covid some of the tory backbenches are plain insane on the subject. I think Boris needed the additional evidence on Friday before he could be confident they would win the internal political battle. I think the data and hospital spare capacity indicates we need a March style lockdown now. Tory backbenchers in the Covid Recovery Group and the ERG are talking about forcing a commons vote to try and reverse Tier 4.

I totally agree the more extreme elements of the Tory party are insane. I’m just not fucking concerned with the politics of this virus, just how prevalent it is and what the risk is.

[ali k]

The best case is...that this is all just a government ploy to ‘cover their arses over not cancelling xmas earlier’.
...the facts suggest that you’re completely wrong.

I'm not suggesting it's simply one or the other. More that they've clearly known about this for longer than they're letting on and are now claiming that the science has changed just in the last few days to explain the late decision over xmas. And when you have a govt minister on the radio talking about the new strain spreading asymptomatically as being "new information" it's just utterly ridiculous.

As Offwidth says, the fact that Johnson has to factor in the covid-denying Tory backbenchers to any decision he makes is insane, if that is the reason he's delayed the changes.

[Stu Littlefair]

Much as I love a bit of Tory bashing that’s just not true. The nervtag meeting minutes are from Friday.

[stone]

we need a March style lockdown now. .
[/quote]

I'd say we also need proper support for those isolating -not just financial but including provision of isolation accommodation. Also proper contact tracing like they do in East Asian countries -establishing who every case caught it off and then finding out who else was infected.

[ali k]

The nervtag meeting minutes are from Friday.

Should have been more specific - I meant the case numbers rising has been known for longer than Friday (i.e. something needed to be done).

[galpinos]

The much worse case is that there actually IS a much more virulent strain of covid spreading uncontrollably across the UK.

This seems to be the key question. It's a strain that has been found in the Netherlands and Germany at least. The Germans aren't worried about it and there seems to be some political play involved in the border closures* so I'm still hopeful that it's not as bad as BJ has made out. We shall see.

*to quote twitter, this is the Free Brexit App with in app purchases for the pro version available from the 1st of Jan.

[galpinos]

Much as I love a bit of Tory bashing that’s just not true. The nervtag meeting minutes are from Friday.

The Torys are "self-bashing". Charles Walker on R4 pretty much accused Matt Hancock of knowing about the new strain and the cancelling Christmas and not doing anything until the MPs went home so they could announce without parliamentary scrutiny.

[stone]

My impression is that the boffins were puzzled at how cases were rising in Kent etc and simultaneously puzzling over a new variant and only very recently joined the dots. The new variant apparently is special in that it has appeared out of no-where, already with a large set of mutations. That led to the speculation that it may have evolved within one chronically infected immunocompromised patient perhaps with the virus under selective pressure from convalescent serum treatment. https://virological.org/t/preliminary-genomic-characterisation-of-an-emergent-sars-cov-2-lineage-in-the-uk-defined-by-a-novel-set-of-spike-mutations/563

It takes a while for it to become apparent that a new variant may have a selective advantage. It doesn't look to me as though this is old data that they have been sitting on.

[Oldmanmatt]

I’m not saying that there’s panic buying going on, but...
We just drove past Sainsbury’s and my 14 year old son said “It’s busy in there”.
By my calculations, it’s been around five years since he last noticed something outside the car whilst we’ve been driving and that was on a “hard to miss” level of “ major fire in a firework warehouse/minor thermonuclear explosion”.

[HarryBD]

Re. the increase in R:

My understanding of R is that it’s a function of the transmissibility of the virus and the behaviour of the population (and susceptibility of the population). R was around 3 in March where behaviour was mostly normal, it dropped to 0.6 in full lockdown as a result of the behaviour change. As a theoretical example if there were 0 interactions between people, R of this new strain couldn’t be between 0.4 and 0.9 because the virus doesn’t spontaneously infect people and if people behaved in a pre COVID way (R~=3) it wouldn’t only increase by 0.9. Why isn’t it being quoted as a relative increase to R? Is this just to make it a more consumable fact by most people or have I misunderstood?

[Offwidth]

I totally agree the more extreme elements of the Tory party are insane. I’m just not fucking concerned with the politics of this virus, just how prevalent it is and what the risk is.

Trouble is the politics and prevalence are now connected. Boris left areas at Tier 2 and Tier 1 that needed to be Tier 3 as a minimum (100% plus growth in a week in all those areas is terrifying). The differences between Tiers 4 and 2/1, and the  timing of the announcement, and the stark change in attitude from PMQs (lampooned xmas cancellation plans of Labour!?) will have added massively to the London exodus of the infected.

As for Stu's point nevrtag did indeed only report on Friday but the scary prevalence growth in Kent has been known for a week now.  I think Boris delayed as he needed more convincing information for his backbenchers (and maybe did cheat a bit by waiting until after the start of the recess).

[tomtom]

Re. the increase in R:

My understanding of R is that it’s a function of the transmissibility of the virus and the behaviour of the population (and susceptibility of the population). R was around 3 in March where behaviour was mostly normal, it dropped to 0.6 in full lockdown as a result of the behaviour change. As a theoretical example if there were 0 interactions between people, R of this new strain couldn’t be between 0.4 and 0.9 because the virus doesn’t spontaneously infect people and if people behaved in a pre COVID way (R~=3) it wouldn’t only increase by 0.9. Why isn’t it being quoted as a relative increase to R? Is this just to make it a more consumable fact by most people or have I misunderstood?

It is being quoted as an increase in R (from what I have seen)... Maybe some press reporting it poorly... but I've not seen that...

@Stone - interesting to hear that - I think that was in the NERVTAG document, but you've made it much clearer...

@Pete - what you said. Think they;ve been caught by surprise by this - and the slam shut the borders response of Europe suggests its pretty darned serious (thats alot of bother for all those countries - never mind the impact on us). They would not be playing part of some Boris political game...

@OMM - every supermarket is busy the week up to Xmas though... its just varying degrees of shopping Armageddon :D

[sdm]

As for Stu's point nevrtag did indeed only report on Friday but the scary prevalence growth in Kent has been known for a week now.  I think Boris delayed as he needed more convincing information for his backbenchers (and maybe did cheat a bit by waiting until after the start of the recess).

The rise in cases may have accelerated in the past week but it has been known about since late November.

Wintertree's excellent work on the other channel pointed out towards the end of the last lockdown that the drop in cases in the SE had been reversed and that cases were trending upwards at a worrying pace.

He also pointed out at the time that this was highly unlikely to be caused by people not obeying lockdown rules because of the rapid switch from cases dropping at the start of lockdown to rising in the second half of lockdown.

[Offwidth]

As wintertree said himself he 'made the call 5 days earlier than Boris' without the benefit of the detail of prevalence that the government scientists had. His work is impressive.

https://www.ukclimbing.com/forums/off_belay/friday_night_covid_plotting_4-729093

https://www.ukclimbing.com/forums/off_belay/friday_night_covid_plotting__3-728848

[stone]

BBC being stunningly clear and well informed for once https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-55388846

[Paul B]

There's another announcement shortly I believe (16:50 BBC).

[Nails]

"The amount of evidence in the public domain is woefully inadequate to draw strong or firm opinions on whether the virus has truly increased transmission," said Prof Jonathan Ball, a virologist at the University of Nottingham.

[petejh]

"The amount of evidence in the public domain is woefully inadequate to draw strong or firm opinions on whether the virus has truly increased transmission," said Prof Jonathan Ball, a virologist at the University of Nottingham.

Tell that to the scientists of nervetag...


From BBC at 4pm. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/world-55392619
The government's New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (Nervtag) has upgraded its confidence that the new variant spreads more easily, the group's chair has said.

Prof Peter Horby told a Science Media Centre briefing: "We now have high confidence that this variant does have a transmission advantage over other virus variants that are currently in the UK."

Minutes from a meeting on Friday said the group, which advises the UK government, had "moderate confidence" in this.

Another Nervtag member, Prof Neil Ferguson, from Imperial College London, told the briefing there was strong evidence the new variant is 50% more transmissible than the previous virus.

He also said there was a "hint" the new variant infects children more.

"There are other epidemiologically interesting trends with the virus, there is a hint that it has a higher propensity to infect children... but we haven't established any sort of causality on that, but we can see that in the data," he said.

[nic mullin]

My understanding:- the test used for the UK Pillar2 testing multiplexes three PCR primer pairs to SARS CoV2 (along with another pair to an internal MS2 control). One of the three pairs doesn't work on this 69-70del new variant but the other two primer pairs do still work fine and, as you say, have been detecting this variant with lower ct.

Thanks for the information, reassuring how much redundancy there is in the testing, and good to hear its paying off. 

I wasn’t aware of the amount of sequencing that was happening either. Like Tomtom says, that high a fraction is impressive, especially given the case load in the UK. Massive shoutout to whoever convinced the government that they couldn’t skimp on it, and surprised they haven’t made more noise about it until now.

Shame the press conference this evening had no real substance, I thought it might be an announcement on the Oxford/AZ vaccine or a Brexit postponement. No such luck.

[tomtom]

The moment I heard Grant Shapps was one of the three - I knew it would be nothing of substance :D

[petejh]

Fuck.. I was quite impressed with the central barrier on the M20 being opened to allow a contra-flow.

It should also allow for U-turns.

[Paul B]

The moment I heard Grant Shapps was one of the three - I knew it would be nothing of substance :D

...and it's looking like what was presented wasn't entirely truthful either (I for one am shocked).

[A.Greenhorne]

One thing confusing me about the pandemic is the current total weekly death rate. It’s slightly above average at the moment consistently around 12,000 and less than the Jan  feb 2018 which was consistently between 12,000 - 15,000. Does this mean the measures are working?

[sdm]

There's a lag between infection and death. The deaths being reported now are mostly people who got infected during the last lockdown. So it means that measures were just about working up to that point.

Lockdown was effective everywhere at reducing cases during its first 2 weeks. Then it began to fail in the SE as areas returned to a rapid increase in cases (despite the lockdown). This failure then spread to a larger geographical area as lockdown progressed.

Since then, we opened things up considerably for a brief time so the rate of increase sped up until tier 4 was introduced for the worst affected areas.

It is almost certain that we will see a large increase in deaths because of this throughout January.

[Offwidth]

It's slightly worse so far than a straightforward  approximate 3 week lag as the cases dropped for a while but deaths 3 weeks later plateaued. It's likely that back end failure of lockdown in the SE and rapid growth after it ended in the SE and London is due to the new mutation with its higher R rate (turbo charged a bit with behaviour changes as lockdown ended). The prevalence information is that the mutation is across the UK now.

If you look at the Guardian map and flick between growth areas and Tiers its clear that Tier 1 is fully on fire (all red for high growth) Tier 2 not far behind (and typically worse closest to London) and Tier 3 more stable but starting to grow (with some worrying signs like the growth in cases in the middle class areas around Nottingham). Tier 4 in the area around London  is not slowing growth yet where the new mutation is now probably dominant.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/22/coronavirus-uk-covid-cases-and-deaths-today