That’s a huge exaggeration.
12 months ago we’d barely vaccinated anyone, we were in a national lockdown and it was all incredibly grim. Today there’s been news of a variant which may, or may not evade the vaccine(and if it does we don’t know how much it will evade it) which may or may not be transmissible enough to cause a problem.
I get the fear whenever something like this comes up but the context is always important.
Agree with this, this is completely different to the emergence of alpha pre-vaccine and emergence of delta early in the vaccine roll out. It's hugely unlikely this new variant would be capable of bypassing immunity completely. It might get around it a bit with regards to infection but even then the important thing is that efficacy against severe disease holds up. It sounds grim with the mutations this one has, but the number of mutations is meaningless, it's what they actually do that counts.
It's still too early for any total panic with this one, the panic is based solely on it's emergence in an area that had very low recent levels of infection. That may still mean this variant has no or very little advantage with transmissibility. South Africa was due a spike in infections, this increase corresponds almost exactly to when their sudden spike began last year - the last week of November. Because of the low levels previous to this, a variant could quickly make up a large proportion of cases helped by a couple of perfectly timed super spreader events and look like it's outcompeting delta. That's where we are now - infections suddenly started to increase (like they did this week last year), they sequenced specifically those sequences from the area with highest increase in infections and found a new variant. Variant looks scary with lots of mutations. Questions now are is it really outcompeting delta or is it an artefact of surge sequencing a particular area, does it have a growth advantage, does it evade immune response? We can infer answers to these by the graphs of prevalence that have come out yesterday but it's not conclusive proof at all for any of these things. We'll just have to wait for more data over the next few days and weeks.
It's hugely encouraging this was found and publicised by the scientists in South Africa so quickly, surveillance is crucial going forward over the next few years. Travel bans like the UK have done are a political necessity for the ruling government (to cover their own arses if it's bad) while more information comes through which should come quickly. UK should also offer support though, you want to encourage countries to report these things quickly which they wont in the future if the only response is a travel ban. South Africa have done exactly what the world complained that China didn't in January 2020. Our response must be different or those complaints against China were just empty.
