Double Mutant

[George K]

Wonderful...

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/28/world/asia/india-covid19-variant.html

At Sir Ganga Ram Hospital, a huge facility in the middle of India’s capital, 37 fully vaccinated doctors came down with Covid-19 earlier this month.

The infections left most with mild symptoms, but it added to their growing fears that the virus behind India’s catastrophic second wave is different. They wonder if a more contagious variant that dodges the immune system could be fueling the epidemic inside the world’s hardest-hit nation.

So far the evidence is inconclusive, and researchers caution that other factors could explain the viciousness of the outbreak, which has overwhelmed India’s capital so quickly that hospitals are entirely overrun and crematories burn nonstop. Still, the presence of the variant could complicate the taming of India’s Covid-19 disaster.
“The current wave of Covid has a different clinical behavior,” said Dr. Sujay Shad, a senior cardiac surgeon at Sir Ganga Ram Hospital, where two of the doctors needed supplemental oxygen to recover. “It’s affecting young adults. It’s affecting families. It’s a new thing altogether. Two-month-old babies are getting infected.”

India’s worries have focused on a homegrown variant called B.1.617. The public, the popular press and many doctors have concluded that it is responsible for the severity of the second wave.

Researchers outside of India say the limited data so far suggests instead that a better-known variant called B.1.1.7 may be a more considerable factor. That variant walloped Britain late last year, hit much of Europe and is now the most common source of new infection in the United States.

“While it’s almost certainly true B.1.617 is playing a role, it’s unclear how much it’s contributing directly to the surge and how that compares to other circulating variants, especially B.1.1.7,” said Kristian Andersen, a virologist at the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego.

“There is a lot of jumping to conclusions that B.1.167 is the explanation for what’s happening,” said Jeffrey Barrett, director of the Covid-19 genomics initiative at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Britain. “These other things are probably more likely to be the explanation.”

Preliminary evidence suggests that the variant is still responsive to vaccines, although slightly less so. India relies heavily on the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, which clinical trials show is less powerful than the vaccines made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna and could perhaps be more easily thwarted by mutations.

“For now the vaccines remain effective, but there is a trend toward less effectiveness,” said Dr. Céline Gounder, an infectious disease physician and epidemiologist at Bellevue Hospital in New York.

In India, a number of doctors point to anecdotal evidence that people who have been fully vaccinated are getting sick. Those doctors also say they are seeing children with serious symptoms, such as severe diarrhea, acidosis and falling blood pressure, even among otherwise healthy patients.

[Mik]

Yikes. Have we done a damn thing yet about shutting down travel from India?

[Axtremus]

@mik said in Double Mutant:

Yikes. Have we done a damn thing yet about shutting down travel from India?

Not yet ... https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/travelers/from-other-countries.html

[George K]

@axtremus said in Double Mutant:

@mik said in Double Mutant:

Yikes. Have we done a damn thing yet about shutting down travel from India?

Not yet ... https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/travelers/from-other-countries.html

Because Biden's administration is not xenophobic and racist, ftw!

[Renauda]

So from here on it'll be the Inja-flu?

[LuFins Dad]

@renauda said in Double Mutant:

So from here on it'll be the Inja-flu?

No, it will be the WuHu Flu with a Twist... Brought to you by 7/11.

[xenon]

There needs to be a global effort to tamp this thing down and get vaccines everywhere. We're one bad mutation away from being screwed.

[Jolly]

@xenon said in Double Mutant:

There needs to be a global effort to tamp this thing down and get vaccines everywhere. We're one bad mutation away from being screwed.

Viruses gotta virus.

[Aqua Letifer]

@xenon said in Double Mutant:

There needs to be a global effort to tamp this thing down and get vaccines everywhere. We're one bad mutation away from being screwed.

At the same time, the number of actual outcomes is very limited. It can't mutate into literally everything and anything. So we still have a shot.