COVID & The Variants
No, I’m not forming a new band, though I think it would make a great name. Covid & the Variant’s and their number one hit ‘You’re all gonna die’, there is certainly potential, but no, let’s talk about the new chapter of fear in this pandemic.
Let’s talk about these variants; because for the past 6 weeks this has been the major talking point by the government and their ‘let’s pretend’ scientist friends.
Just today Boris ‘bla bla, bumble bumble’ Johnson spoke to the British People in yet another live televised broadcast about the new variant:
Early evidence suggests the variant of coronavirus that emerged in the UK may be more deadly – BBC News[1]
Scary, huh?
Sir Patrick Vallance, the UK’s chief scientist, suggested that there was an increased risk of dying from the new UK derived variant first found in the South East of England.
There is some evidence that a new coronavirus variant first identified in southeast England carries a higher risk of death than the original strain, the British government’s chief scientific adviser said Friday — though he stressed that the data is uncertain. – 6ABC[2]
In reality, there is no science to back up such claims, or at least no science has been published or presented to support these claims. It would seem they have simply plucked this out of a little data analysis over the past couple weeks.
Sir Patrick Vallance said:
“the average risk is that for 1,000 people who got infected, roughly 10 would be expected to unfortunately die. With the new variant, for 1,000 people infected, roughly 13 or 14 people might be expected to die,” – 6ABC[2]
That’s a 30 to 40% increase in death if this is believed to be true, but the very fact that they later make the statement:
“the evidence is not yet strong” – 6ABC[2]
Ultimately, this has to come from comparing death rates in people infected with either the new or the old versions of the virus. Which has so much room for error and what was the data sample size, because unless we are talking about a significant number of people, the results are meaningless.
But anyway, I procrastinate, let’s talk about COVID and the Variants.
If you only sourced your information from the daily new and government announcements, you might assume that SARS-CoV-2 only began mutating in the past couple months. Of course this is a ridiculous thing to believe when you really consider it, but it does seem many do not consider much they are being told these days.
Take a look at this sub-heading from an article in The Mirror just last week:
Since Covid-19 – technically called Sars-CoV-2 – began spreading across the globe last year, three new main strains have been found in Brazil, the UK and South Africa – The Mirror[3]
Three new strains! (they are not strains, but variants – I’ll get into this later) Oh no, the virus has mutated!
Yes, it is, in fact is has been mutating daily since the virus was first identified (still not isolated though…)
Nextstrain.org[4] has been tracking the genome of the SARS-CoV-2 virus since early on in the pandemic and at time of writing this the number of variants is at 4046. Yes, you read that correctly, not three, not five, over four thousand.
So why only now are we hearing of these variants. Why now is the media reporting on the new variants as something to fear?
It is either because it makes great headlines and they think their readers are too dumb to see through their fear-mongering nonsense, or it’s a narrative now being pushed by whoever is directing Westminster right now, and the lamestream media are just doing what they do best, echoing the wisdom of their masters, without question. Likely it’s a combination of both.
All viruses mutate and RNA viruses more so than DNA based viruses, this is one of the main reasons a vaccine has never been produced in the past, because it mutates so quickly that traditional methods of developing vaccines just wouldn’t be able to keep up with how quickly the virus mutates.
