‘Quick’ stats update….Mutations, the ‘Spanish strain’, and Policy-making.
From a good ‘mutations’ question from Shaun…
Coronaviruses tend to mutate slowly, which historically generally makes them no more deadly than they were (per infection), but means vaccines last only until the next mutations (so there are more infections and overall sickness). The Common Cold vaccine research programme was abandoned after decades of trying (though flu vaccines are 20-80% effective each year) due to 250 mutations circulating.
The Spanish strain of Covid, 20A.EU1 was brought back by holidaymakers in Summer, but there’s no evidence it’s any different in its effect from what was circulating in Feb/March. Back then it was doubling every 4 days (R=3.5) and killing 1,000 old/vulnerable per day before lockdown stopped it rising fast after the predictable time lags from infection to re-infection to fatality. Now the Spanish version is widespread but we ‘only’ have R=1.5 here in UK with a more careful society than in February, so on balance I don’t think it’s worse, just interesting we can track its source.
This is helpful though to show again how a small number of infections in one place in Summer can soon become very wide. That’s the exponential effect of R>1 sadly. It’s especially true now anywhere in cold, densely populous, interconnected Europe. This is a nasty combination of factors, all of which encourage greater spread compared to say Vietnam or South Africa.
The suggestion of abandoning measures and going for herd immunity fails because the old/vulnerable are numerous in Europe and not sufficiently ‘isolatable’. Until this is solved the herd advocates are unfairly dumping the problem on them. I estimate ‘herd’ with no careful behaviour costs the UK roughly 600,000 fatalities in the first year and 400,000 in year 2, with NHS staff totally (and beyond) overwhelmed with Covid rather than other important health work. And this in itself damages the economy and fatalities badly too.
So we need to keep the economy as open as possible, though it will need to shift. We can create and promote more ‘localism’ – better virus ‘fire-breaks’ to better isolate all levels of geography from national (reduce international travel) to local (household, WFH, village, town bubbles) where, and as far as, possible. We will become a more primary-focused economy. Grow your own, make your own, fix your own. Great for reducing pollution, waste, climate too. Travel still happens, but less needed. The obsession with financial measures of success like Gross Domestic Product finally falls away. Unemployment is serious but becomes mixed with programmes for simple self-sufficiency. Lots of innovations come forward Eg Why doesn’t each village or town surround itself with a ‘moat’ or ring of tens/hundreds of thousands of fruit trees that anyone needy can pick for their own needs?
Crossing macro fire-breaks (deliveries, sports teams across cities) is only for those virus tested and certificated. It will come, and will get easier as systems improve. This slows R to less than 1 and then, even without a vaccine, the virus is then dying progressively, as long as it’s maintained after this (unlike Scotland’s short-sighted Level 0 ‘reward’ of greater mixing). Then everything gets easier, as long as it’s maintained for a year or so.
Another mutation in Sars-Cov-2, called D614G, has been identified which is believed to make the virus more infectious.
So if we let a more infectious mutation go around, this is bad news, and shows even more need for the fire-breaks.
All of us demanding very good personal Covid behaviour (hands, face, space – but add frequent soap surface cleaning by everyone) is a start. Then collectively a move to more and more voluntary/local authority area localism is gradually the way forward in my current view.
This causes change and difficulty for the economy and society, but the least change and difficulty, and has some benefits for post-heavy-industrial sustainable living.
Not perfect, but an emerging idea. Happy to hear better well-founded ideas…with my Facebook mates we can avoid too many tragedies and fix this thing 😀.