Finding the UK’s dominant Covid-19 variant and the race to understand its impact | Hacker News Reader

Finding the UK’s dominant Covid-19 variant and the race to understand its impact

publichealthmatters.blog.gov.uk

> “It was quite unusual. Up to that point, the virus had been characterised by having a relatively slow mutational rate, maybe two variations a month. Suddenly out of nowhere we’ve got this large cluster featuring mutations that were significantly different to what we’d looked at before.”

This is just completely untrue. The mutation rate, as far as I'm aware, is not changed. We've been tracking mutations to the virus since its emergence, and there are literally thousands of strains:

https://nextstrain.org/ncov/global

Perhaps public health in the UK was not tracking mutations, but suddenly discovering that a situation exists is not prima facie evidence of a crisis. The circumstance here seems to be that the people involved in this particular project decided to start looking for things, and as is usual when you start looking for things in science, you find things. This is amplified by the fact that S-gene dropout made them more aware of this particular strain than most, since it mucked up their PCR tests.

(Edit: also, you can see that strains rising/falling to/from local dominance has been seen repeatedly throughout 2020. This, in itself, is not an exceptional finding, despite the article's attempt to paint it as such. B.1.1.7 does seem to be selectively advantaged in a more general way, but again, that's not prima facie evidence of a crisis. Just because a strain has a selective advantage over other strains does not mean that the strain is more dangerous -- and so far, all claims to this extent have been quite weak. For example, the claims that B.1.1.7 are more lethal have been called into question with later, better research. [1])

[1] https://www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdisease/covid19/92057

In the UK science must be aligned with politics (check Dr Nutt problem)

I'm almost a complete outsider to UK politics, so I try to stay neutral, but this is a truly bizarre thing for a scientist to say.

Well, typically first there is a policy and then scientists have to come up with theories to support it. Only if it is not possible, policy changes to meet science somewhere in the middle.

Here is some context. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1BP367JdHro

As I understand it, the UK was doing more tracking of Covid-19 mutations than pretty much everyone else on the planet, which is exactly why this stood out.

(edit: removed. guess I was wrong. it does make it even more incredible that someone involved with that much sequencing could make such a claim.)

The UK is the word leader in COVID sequencing[0].

[0]https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-the-u-k-became-world-leader...

> In the past year, more than 360,000 SARS-CoV-2 genomes have been sequenced and stored on GISAID, a non-profit online database for sharing viral genomes. Geographic distribution of the sequences on GISAID is broad, covering more than 140 countries. But most countries have uploaded only a small number of sequences. Two exceptions are the United Kingdom and Denmark, which respectively account for 45% and 7% of SARS-CoV-2 genomes on the database.[1]

This is from an article published in January this year. The UK had sequenced and shared 45% of the sequences in the GISAID database at that point in time. Which is a lot.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00065-4

For anyone that hasn't seen this yet:

https://covariants.org/per-country

B.1.1.7 is the strain referred to here as 20I/501Y.V1

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