One year ago today, the city of Wuhan declared an emergency closure as the CCP virus pneumonia spread across the country, and for 76 days, everyone in Wuhan felt more or less confused and scared.
Will the Epidemic ever end, and will we ever see each other again?
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Two and a half months later, Wuhan was unsealed. On New Year’s Eve, balloons and ribbons celebrating the arrival of 2021 fluttered in the night sky over the Hankou river bank. Looking back on the pain and suffering of a year ago, I can’t help but feel like a lifetime ago.
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Most cities across the country have returned to normal Life, with some areas still battling the outbreak. But now, a year later, we have learned to live with a virus that is no longer possible to eradicate anytime soon.
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But while the painful memories may fade with the year 2021, the virus does not turn the page with the calendar. A year later, China and the world still face a huge challenge.
In the early hours of this morning, I was jolted awake again by the BBC’s news and woke up in a cold sweat:
Prime Minister Boris said at a Downing Street briefing that the new variant of strain B.1.1.7 found in the UK not only spreads faster, but may also have a higher lethality rate.
This comes as an absolute bolt from the blue after cases of infection with this new strain have been reported in 60 countries around the world. Especially when infected people have also been found in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangdong and Shandong in China, it is even more worrying that this new threat will not wipe out our previous efforts.
Here’s the first thing to tell you not to panic too much. The arrival of B.1.1.7 does not mean the end of the world.
Let’s review what the British government said at the launch. First, Chief Scientific Advisor Valens said that the spread of B.1.1.7 is the main reason for the high number of new confirmed cases in the UK, which has reached more than 40,000 new confirmed cases and 1,401 deaths this day.
Immediately afterwards Prime Minister Boris said, “We are told today that in addition to spreading faster, there now appears to be evidence that the variant strains initially found in London and the South East may also be more lethal.”
The meeting caused panic among the British public right after it ended, with some scientists rushing to say that Boris’ claims were inaccurate. It could not be proven that B.1.1.7 was any more lethal than other strains.
Chief Scientific Advisor Sir Patrick Vallance clarified
The UK’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) said the report was given to Downing Street before a meeting that day, and that Boris may not have understood it clearly before making the news public, causing panic.
The real conclusion of the SAGE study is that there is a “realistic possibility” that the B.1.1.7 variant will lead to an increased risk of death. (realistic possibility)
Some members of SAGE
The academic wording is very careful and realistic possibility means that the study is less than 50% certain. The researchers were not able to make an absolute connection between the new variants found in the UK and the high lethality rate.
This is because the evidence for higher lethality in current studies is still weak, and the scope of data collection for the experiment is still relatively small.
The paper shows that the University of Exeter concluded that B.1.1.7 is 1.91 times more lethal than the original virus. Imperial College London gave a conclusion of 1.36 times the lethality rate.
And the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine came up with a 1.35 times higher risk of death for B.1.1.7 than the original virus over 28 days. The data were derived from 2,583 deaths out of 1.2 million people tested.
SAGE believes that the studies were limited to a few hundred or a few thousand people and that the sample size was not large enough to draw conclusions with any certainty of accuracy. And the Oxford professor said there was actually no increase in mortality among seriously ill patients hospitalized with the mutant strain found in the UK.
But because B.1.1.7 is so infectious, more people are infected and the number of seriously ill people inevitably increases. When the number of seriously ill people becomes larger, the number of deaths may be even larger. However, this does not mean that the B.1.1.7 strain itself is more lethal.
It is even possible that the mortality rate fluctuated because the second outbreak in the UK, caused by B.1.1.7, was not well treated due to a lack of medical resources.
The SAGE paper notes that “even if it were true that the risk of death from the new strain was confirmed to be 30-40% higher, this would only mean that for every 1000 confirmed cases, there would be 3 to 4 additional deaths.”
In other words, what they are trying to convey is that the new strains found in the UK will not really show a spike in mortality worldwide, and even if they do, it will only increase a little. (Speechless. A little bit is a human life.)
The UK epidemic has now reached its peak and is on a downward trend today. In particular, the UK’s R-value, which stands for “how many people an infected individual will infect with the disease,” has decreased dramatically, and the larger the value, the worse the situation.
The UK has seen a drop from 1.2-1.3 last month to 0.8-1. The rampage of new strains should moderate from today onwards.
But this does not mean that we can take the new strain B.1.1.7 found in the UK lightly. Sturgeon, the leader of the Scottish National Party, has warned that at this rate, the UK will not be back to normal by summer.
And with the UK health system still on the verge of collapse and nearing saturation, even if the new strain is not more deadly, it will not stop more people from getting sick and being hospitalized.
The BBC again depicted the desperate situation of contemporary medical workers in a short video last week. The medical officer in charge of autopsies at the Royal London Hospital burst into tears in front of the camera as she said she had disposed of the remains of hundreds of patients with the CCP virus, but the morgue continued to welcome body after body like a conveyor belt of corpses.
Marie Healy, an intensive care consultant, said the hospital no longer has any capacity to provide advanced ICU care because the more than 200 patients with the CCP virus have depleted its resources.
And she has to make regular calls to grieving and fearful patients’ families to inform their loved ones that their condition has worsened or is not improving. After a call to an impoverished wife, tears flowed from her eyes.
“I think to this day, people don’t fully understand the seriousness of what’s going on.”
At the end of the day, even if the new strain discovered in the U.K. is no different in lethality than the original virus, without a focus on prevention, masks, and rules of Home isolation or social distance, then the virus will still be massively contagious and death will still land all around us.
The only redeeming factor is that scientists still believe that B.1.1.7 is not likely to render existing vaccines ineffective. However, the variants found in South Africa and Brazil are cause for concern on this issue.
The 501Y.v2 found in South Africa may be even more transmissible than the variant strain found in the UK. The scary thing is that in the laboratory, it has shown to have reduced monoclonal resistance to the virus.
That is, it could, and only could, make our existing vaccines less effective, or even render them ineffective.
In the Science article, biologist Jesse Bloom states that they have identified several mutations on 501Y.v2, with the E484K mutation causing a 10-fold reduction in the effectiveness of some recovery sera (used in recovery serotherapy, provided by survivors of the CCP virus).
There is also a lack of additional data to demonstrate just how much the mutant strains found in South Africa will affect immunity.
The British health minister was scolded for this (why the UK again) when he told a meeting that “the South African variant would reduce the effectiveness of existing vaccines by 50%, and I’m not sure that’s true”.
I’m not sure if that’s true.” “If this strain is dominant in the UK, then our vaccine is probably going to be obsolete and we may have to go back to square one.”
Although the meeting was closed to the public, his words soon got out and caused another panic. sage was also quite speechless, stating that if you don’t know, don’t talk nonsense and scare people everywhere.
As a politician, it is better to add less fuel to the scientific issues, first control not to wear a mask, decisive quarantine is still running around the people it …
In fact, the most worrying variant now is neither the one found in the UK nor in South Africa, but the Brazilian variant of the virus that has been far from being taken seriously.
Although not much reported in most media, the outbreak in Brazil is now very serious. There have been more than 205,000 deaths in Brazil, second only to the United States. But the level of medical care is a million miles away from the United States.
The city of Manaus, now the epicenter of the epidemic, has collapsed. The city’s hospitals are running out of oxygen! This means that many patients who are admitted to Manaus hospitals for diseases like CCP virus pneumonia, which desperately need oxygen, are still without oxygen and end up waiting to die alive.
Due to the overwhelming number of remains, the government had to purchase refrigerated containers for the hospitals to use as temporary morgues. But what caused more anxiety for researchers was the mutated strain itself.
In December 2020, Faria, an associate professor at Oxford University, published a paper in the journal Science in which she analyzed the horrific outbreak in Manaus and concluded that – as early as last year – about three-quarters of the city’s residents had been infected with the CCP virus.
An infection of this magnitude is reasonably large enough to create the legendary herd immunity. This, combined with Brazil’s hot climate, was not conducive to the spread of the virus.
After the clock struck 2021, Manaus was still rising like crazy, and then the “oxygen deficiency” scenario at the beginning of this paragraph occurred.
The researcher took samples from 31 confirmed patients in Manaus, and a mutated virus called P.1 was found in 13 of them. The researcher initially speculated that P.1 may have evolved “the ability to escape the human immune response.
That is, the patient would have developed antibodies after infection with the CCP virus to recognize and immunize against it the next Time he or she was exposed to it. However, if P.1 has the ability to “escape immunity,” then it can repeatedly infect people who have had the disease before.
The Manaus situation is again serious, probably not because the variant of P.1 is more contagious, but because it makes people lose their immunity to the C.C.V. virus.
That would be a scary thing for humans, P.1 has now reached Japan (there are many Japanese immigrants in Brazil), and if P.1’s immune escape ability is confirmed, it is likely to have a greater impact on existing vaccines than the variant found in South Africa, and at worst it could be completely ineffective.
The study is still ongoing. The number of samples is not yet sufficient to confirm the escape ability of P.1, and it is possible that such a situation could be just a coincidence. The WHO has also not yet found resistance to any of the strains of the CCP virus.
But the bad news is that the WHO has also shown that these rapidly evolving mutant strains indicate that they are likely to evolve drug-resistant traits at some point in the future.
So the most urgent things to do now are three.
- Take care of yourself and take protective measures to reduce the possibility of getting sick from the root cause
- Accelerate the global vaccination and do everything possible to vaccinate as many people as possible. Complete immunization before the virus evolves worse.
- Expand research and data exchange and sharing to facilitate tracking the “every move” of mutated strains
Changes in human behavior are the main cause of outbreaks, so don’t put the blame on mutating viruses. There are many things that we did not do well enough or fast enough to cause.
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