Closing the Barn door after the virus has escaped

When do we learn? For the past two or three weeks, the world has been bragging about a new Covid-19 virus variant, one that UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson has announced is far more portable than other variants.

Johnson has the news that several other countries, including the US and France, have banned travel from the UK for some time. As scientists began testing for the new variant, at least 3 states in the U.S. — California, Colorado, and Florida — have reportedly discovered the new variant as well. Expect many more states (and other countries) to report finding the opposite in the coming days.

In the UK, the new variant was first discovered in September, and by November a quarter of London cases were caused by this variation. That is worrying.

My first thought when I heard this new variant was to ask if it was actually more mobile or not. The evidence is very preliminary, and has not yet been peer-reviewed, but a fairly recent study a week ago says that, the new variant is 56% more flexible.

Okay, that’s not very good. But there is no evidence that the new variant (known as B117 or VOC 202012/01) is more lethal, or that the vaccine will not work against it. It just spreads faster.

My second response was about these new travel bans. Why would anyone think that the opposite was only in the UK, simply because the UK was open about reporting on it? If we don’t know for sure, a travel ban is a classic case, as the ad goes, of closing the barn door after the horse (the virus) has escaped.

So has the B117 virus already spread outside the UK? Yes, it shows that.

In a new study released just two days ago on medRxiv, scientists at Helix, a company that has tested millions of samples for the presence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, looked, looking back at their test data over the past several months. They found that evidence of the B117 virus in the U.S. stretches back at least to October. They also found that the variant is now spreading to the eastern U.S., in Massachusetts, Ohio, and Florida.

An important caveat is that Helix tests did not look specifically for the B117 strain. Instead they looked at two major deletions in the spike protein (which I mentioned before) that are in the B117 snout, and that their tests can also detect. They may have found different sequences that shared the deletions, but even though the rays they found did not match B117, it is possible that they were just as infectious. .

So yes, the new strain seems to be in the US already, and it seems to have been here since October. And if it’s been in the UK since September, and the US since October, well it’s a good bet that it’s pretty much everywhere. Banning travel from the UK not only penalizes the UK for openly sharing its findings, but can also prevent other countries from sharing information about newer strains of the virus. , if these appear.

What should we do in response to the new snoring? The most effective course of action is to distribute vaccines even faster, something public health authorities across the US are trying to do. So far it is not going well, partly because we do not have a consistent national strategy. It is not too late to put that right.

But let’s not assume that travel restrictions now do anything to keep this new pressure locked. They just close the barn door after the horse escapes. Or “Vijgen na pasen” as they say in Flemish, or “arriver après la bataille” in French. There are idioms for this behavior in all languages, it seems.