COVID Update: Variants! The Newest Trend in COVID Fear

Happy day 385 of 14 to stop the spread of the virus, and the province of Ontario is entering its third lockdown. But I don’t know why people are upset cause we really never left the first one. This is complete madness given my views have not changed on COVID, and it turns out most of the predictions have been correct: The economy is in shambles, we failed to protect the elderly and infirm, school children and young adults are suffering from depression, and masks still do not work to stop the spread of COVID (see image below) – not one study has come out refuting the Danish Study of November.

The topic of the elderly and infirm is one of the most disappointing considering this virus has been age stratified since I first heard of it in January 2020. Out of the 23,000 deaths to date, 96% of those deaths are over the age of 60 (Statistics Canada, 2021). Furthermore, out of those 21,700 deaths over the age of 60, 69% came from long term care (LTC) homes reflecting over 14,000 were infirmed patients (Ireton, 2021, March 30). This is not just a Canadian phenomenon it is a global phenomenon showing that elderly people cross-culturally are more susceptible to the virus. But that doesn’t get the heart rate going does it? Now it is the talk about variants and the effect they have on younger people producing long hauler symptoms. I will not do a treatise on long hauler – if you would like to read more check out the blog I did in October on showing the statistically insignificant findings on Long-COVID (Babich, 2020, October 7).

However, I think it is important to do this blog post as a Q and A – as in – common questions that are discussed around variants, and the answers according to the research.

Question: Are the variants more transmissible?

The initial reports of the B.1.1.7. Variant out of the United Kingdom in Report 42 show phylodynamic modeling done by Neil Ferguson that this variant is more transmissible by 50-70% (Volz et al. 2020). Of course, this is the same Neil Ferguson whos earlier model on deaths – one I even looked at in the beginning – was wildly overrated and routinely disavowed by many in the mathematic and medical community (Ackland, 2020, October 7; Adam, 2020, April 3; St. Onge, 2020, June 4). Ferguson used phylodynamic modeling which epidemiologically makes a perdiction on the course of viral infections through non-standardized metrics discounting biases to which the professionals are right to question given research shows phylodynamic modeling is flawed when predicting actualities through evolutionary complexities (Frost et al. 2015). With that said, modeling is a tool to see an abstract path of a viral infection, but the numerical characteristics were used which is always inflated in phylodynamics leading to fear.

This takes us to November of 2020, where UCL professor Lucy Van Dorp decided to look beyond hypothetical models and serogenetically study the COVID-19 variants. She found that there were a present amount of 12,000 different COVID variants stemming from wild type, and that none of the variants held characteristics of increased viral transmission (Van Dorp et al., 2020). Although certain variants may become more dominant – like the B.1.1.7 – they harbour no increased risk of infection.

Question: Are the variants more deadly?

Given the previous data about transmissibility, one would deduce they are not more deadly. With that said, there has been no peer reviewed study on the threatening aspects of the variant since these variants will – if not already – produced variants of their own. One release from Johns Hopkins University suggest that given the variant spread is looking for a host, if it caused more death we would not be seeing the variants around (Bollinger & Ray, 2021, February 22). Given the current data of deaths declining in North America and news reports suggesting the variants have been in Canada since December 26 (Parkhill & Mae Jones, 2020, December 26), one can conclude that the variants are not more lethal.

Question: Are the variants more detrimental to younger people?

In the JHU article there is no significant evidence to suggest that the variants infect or harm younger people with more frequency, this includes children (Bollinger & Ray, 2021, February 22).

Question: Does the vaccine or natural infection immunity work against the variants?

Two recent studies suggest that this is an overwhelming yes. Both natural infection along with vaccination help against all types of variants stemming from the wild type COVID (Edara et al., 2021). Furthermore, our cellular immune response in the form of T-Cells protect against all variants of concern (Redd, 2021) through seroprevalence of previous COVID infection or T-Cell immunity from past coronaviruses – such as the common cold. This suggests that the inevitability of herd immunity is greatly approaching.

Conclusion

I happen to think this is fantastic news which accompanies the wonderful Op-Ed by Marty Makary (Johns Hopkins Public Health Professor) who suggests by the end of April we will have herd immunity through vaccination and natural infection (Makary, 2021, February 18). However, with all this great news, the negativity and doom seems to be more – or the same amount of palpability in society. Lockdowns in France and Canada, the director of the CDC almost crying on television, Fauci saying kids should not play outside without wearing a mask, corporate industries suggesting health passports to live your life – and people agreeing with it, and rolling lockdowns and masks for the foreseeable future. One cannot help but think that are our leaders and their followers truly this scared or do they like the crafted pandemic compliance they carved for themselves over the past year?

Does the old lady who yells to put my mask over my nose enjoy this sense of control because she has none in a normal world? Is this to a governments or corporations benefit to stoke this pandemic response and milk it for all its worth? Although this is fantastic news, I still feel it falling on deaf ears, I don’t think people want to know the good news, because normal was not applicable to some, but people are waking up. I would say it is time to come out of your shells and when someone says they’re fearful for their safety and you’re the problem, you have proudly state that your fear is about as important as that tissue in the garbage can and not my concern (or whatever analogy acceptable). It is not our job to be stewards of public health – that’s what taxes pay for, and it is not our job to capitulate to the fears of a group of people who truly feel that they can win the billion year battle against microbes through masking and shaming others.

Its time, figure it out, get back to the old normal.

References

Adam, D. (2020, April 3). The simulations driving the world’s response to COVID-19. Nature Special Report. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01003-6

Acklund, G. J. (2020, October 7). Covid-19: Modelling the pandemic. British Medical Journal. https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2020/10/07/covid-19-modelling-the-pandemic/

Babich, C. (2020, October 7). Critiquing the Long-Term Conditions of COVID-19: Questioning the Continuing ‘Terror Narrative’ of ‘Long-Covid. Carson’s Education Blog. https://carsonbabich.wordpress.com/2020/10/07/critiquing-the-long-term-conditions-of-covid-19-questioning-the-continuing-terror-narrative-of-long-covid/

Bollinger, R., Ray, S. (2021, February 22). New Variants of Coronavirus: What You Should Know. Johns Hopkins University Medicine. https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseases/coronavirus/a-new-strain-of-coronavirus-what-you-should-know

Edara et al. (2021). Neutralizing Antibodies Against SARS-CoV-2 Variants After Infection and Vaccination. Journal of the American Medical Association, March. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2777898

Frost, S. D. W. et al. (2015). Eight challenges in phylodynamic inference, Epidemics 10, 88-92. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4383806/

Ireton, J. (2021, March 30). Canada’s nursing homes have worst record for COVID-19 deaths among wealthy nations: report. CBC News. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/canada-record-covid-19-deaths-wealthy-countries-cihi-1.5968749

Makary, M. (2021, February 18). We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April. Wall Street Journal. https://www.wsj.com/articles/well-have-herd-immunity-by-april-11613669731

Parkhill, M., & Mae Jones, A. (2020, December 26). Confirmed cases of new COVID-19 variant in Canada are ‘unsurprising’, experts say. CTV News. https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/coronavirus/confirmed-cases-of-new-covid-19-variant-in-canada-are-unsurprising-experts-say-1.5245376

Redd, A. D. (2021). CD8+ T cell responses in COVID-19 convalescent individuals target conserved epitopes from multiple prominent SARS-CoV-2 circulating variants. Oxford Infectious Diseases. https://academic.oup.com/ofid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/ofid/ofab143/6189113

St. Onge, P. (2020, June 4). The Flawed COVID-19 Model That Locked Down Canada. Montreal Economic Institute. https://www.iedm.org/the-flawed-covid-19-model-that-locked-down-canada/

Statistics Canada. (2021). Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19): Epidemiology Summary, Updated: April 1, 2021. https://health-infobase.canada.ca/covid-19/epidemiological-summary-covid-19-cases.html#a5

Van Dorp, L. et al. (2020). No evidence for increased transmissibility from recurrent mutations in SARS-CoV-2. Nature 11. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-19818-2

Volz, E., & Ferguson, N. et al. (2020). Report 42 – Transmission of SARS-CoV-2 Lineage B.1.1.7 in England: insights from linking epidemiological and genetic data. Imperial College. https://www.imperial.ac.uk/mrc-global-infectious-disease-analysis/covid-19/report-42-sars-cov-2-variant/