The Road goes ever on and on ... Day 289 (789)

I had several sets of notes taken for today's blog and then sat down and followed a tweet from Eric Topol that sucked me down a rabbit hole of sorts. The original reference requires no technical background to understand, but if you don't want to check for yourself, here are a few key points:

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"The Delta variant that caused devastating surges around the world in 2021 had mutations in L452 as well, so many scientists have been watching this hot spot carefully, including Yunlong Richard Cao of Peking University. On 11 April, Cao says, he and his colleagues noticed a pattern: New Omicron sublineages from New York, Belgium, France, and South Africa all had changes in L452. 'The independent appearance of four different mutations at the same site? That's not normal,' Cao says.

"...the new variations apparently helped the Omicron subvariants evade those previously powerful antibodies."

"Based on its immunological profile, it 'should be called SARS-3,' he says--an entirely distinct virus. ['He' is Linfa Wang, a bat coronavirus researcher.] "The limited protection that BA.1 provided against the new subvariants in lab studies has already raised questions about how useful the new Omicron-specific vaccines might be. Wang says the virus is evolving too quickly for strain-specific vaccines to keep up. Instead, a broad cocktail of monoclonal antibodies targeting different strains might be the best way forward, he says."

"Kristian Andersen, who studies viral evolution at Scripps Research, draws a sobering lesson from the newest Omicron variants. Although we don't know what future variants will look like, he says, 'we can be certain that they'll continue to be more and more capable of immune escape,' possibly leading to lower protection against nor just infection, but also against severe disease. 'We need to focus on broadening out immunity,' he says.

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Son #1 says this is all hype despite its having been published in Science, a quite reputable journal. He reads it as the variants not being an "entirely distinct" virus, but just a mutated, milder form. In my Twilight Zone, dystopian mind, I find it well worth concrete investigation. Maybe covid-19 should be covid-21 since Omicron emerged in late 2021. In terms of immunity, I've read that people with antibodies to the older, "original" version of SARS have some immunity to the novel version of SARS. In that case, having had SARS-2 should give some immunity to SARS-3. Stay tuned. News at 11:00?

As for the other notes I made, the state media in North Korea is now saying "covid" instead of "fever." Six deaths have been reported in the 350,000 cases. It seems that while the entire country is essentially locked down, 187,800 people are in formal quarantine. Kim Jon-Un has been seen wearing a mask. He criticized health officials saying that the outbreak "shows that there is a vulnerable point in the epidemic prevention system." (If I were one of those health officials, I'd be worrying about how to get my ass and those of my family out of the country without delay.) Analysts are warning of a major humanitarian crisis. One says, "We are in the early stage of the spread of vast human misery. The nature and scale of the illnesses, deaths, hunger, and starvation can only be established much later." Some people are wondering whether the new publicity is really a request for help. China has formally offered help. South Korea and the US have made it known that they are open to dialogue. 

After the director of WHO called China's zero-covid policy "unsustainable," all photos and references to him have been removed from the Chinese internet. The government has called the WHO director's remark "irresponsible" adding that WHO did not have a "proper understanding of the facts." As Dragnet's Sgt. Friday used to say, "The facts, ma'm. Nothing but the facts."