China's New COVID Crisis Could Spawn the Worst Variant Yet - 0 views
www.thedailybeast.com/ld-spawn-the-worst-variant-yet
china covid-19 evolution lineage risks analysis
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Then came Omicron. The new lineage, which first appeared in South Africa last fall, is by far the most transmissible. Some experts described the earlier form of Omicron, the BA.1 sublineage, as the most contagious respiratory virus they’d ever seen, owing in part to key mutations on the spike protein, the part of the virus that helps it grab onto and infect human cells.
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The BA.2 sublineage that soon replaced BA.1 is even worse: potentially 80 percent more contagious than BA.1. There’s also a very rare “recombinant” form of Omicron called XE that combines the qualities of BA.1 and BA.2 and might be 10 percent more transmissible than even BA.2.
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even if they are reasonably effective, the vaccines are unevenly distributed in China. The government’s attacks on foreign jabs has had the effect of encouraging anti-vax attitudes, especially among older Chinese who might be less media-savvy than their younger counterparts.
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The virus kept spreading. By early April officials were logging an average of around 15,000 new cases a day. A spike in deaths followed. In Hong Kong alone, nearly 9,000 people have died since mid-February. To be clear, that’s a fraction of the infections and deaths that countries with fewer restrictions tallied during the worst of their own COVID surges. What’s so worrying in China is the trend—and the potential for cases, and deaths, to keep going up and up.
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“It could be that we are seeing the resurgences in China, including the emergence and spread of new sub-strains, primarily because the population there never achieved high levels of natural immunity,”
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You can’t build up natural antibodies across a large population if no one is ever exposed to the virus. That’s the downside of total lockdowns
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The antibodies in recovered COVID patients lend strong immunity that, combined with vaccinations across large groups of people, can help blunt the impact of a new lineage. Michael for one said he believes natural immunity is stronger and longer-lasting than immunity resulting from even the best messenger-RNA vaccines.
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“They also used inactivated viruses in their Sinovac and Sinopharm vaccines, which I had expected to be more robust than mRNA vaccines in terms of producing a more diversified immune response that could counter new mutants, et cetera,” Michael said, “but apparently it would seem that this response has waned, making people susceptible again to new strains.”
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BA.1 and BA.2 shrugged off China’s strict social distancing. Even the most fleeting contact between family members, neighbors and coworkers was enough to ignite a viral firestorm in China starting in January.
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just half of the most vulnerable age group–over-80s–is fully vaccinated. That plus the lack of natural immunity has left millions of Chinese exposed to aggressive lineages that can punch right through lockdowns.
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. “Any place can be a source of new variants, but those places with low levels of population immunity and unchecked spread of the virus are the most likely,”
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“What if we had 50 million people pull slot-machine levers simultaneously at the same time?” Moshiri asked. “We would expect at least one person would hit the jackpot pretty quickly. Now, replace the slot machine with ‘clinically-meaningful SARS-CoV-2 mutation,’ and that’s the situation we're in.”
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All that is to say, the longer COVID rates remain high in the world’s most-populous country, the greater the chance that the next major lineage will be Chinese.
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New lineages are inevitable from one country or another, of course. The trick is to slow the rate of mutation so that fresh vaccine formulations, therapies and public-health policies can at least keep pace with major changes in the virus.
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billion people with uneven rates of vaccination by potentially low-quality jabs and very little natural immunity to back up the shots.