Some new information from a well-informed source. The WHO calls it OMICRON:
This pandemic has been all about communicating uncertainty and it doesn’t get more uncertain than early data on new variants.
So a few things to keep in mind the next few days and weeks as the picture around B.1.1.529 becomes clearer and why it’s right to be concerned
Most importantly: We will learn a lot in the coming days but getting good answers takes time, science takes time.
For instance, researchers in SA are growing the virus now for experiments but that can take a week or two (and different variants differ in how well they grow)
Interpreting real world data is difficult. An increase in one variant in one place can have a lot of reasons and they don’t all have to do with the variant. A superspreading event – or a series of them – can also lead to a rapid increase for instance
If it is the variant, then there are still different reasons why it might be outcompeting delta:
Is the virus better at re-infecting recovered or vacccinated people or is it inherently more transmissible? Or is it a mix of the two?Immune escape is easier to parse.
First experiments will use other viruses that have been engineered to carry the spike of B.1.1.529 and test how well serum from vaccinees does against these.
Later experiments will test the actual virus against these sera.We can also tell more about immune escape from the genome alone and what we see there is really concerning. For instance, with monoclonal antibody therapies we know precisely what parts of the virus they recognise and some of these are different here.
Great work done by @jbloom_lab has put us in a position to judge the effect of some of these mutations.
For instance, the REGEN-CoV antibody cocktail could be affected by some mutations:
Of course humans don’t just make an antibody or two they are a lot of different ones. But this variant has a lot of changes that could affect a lot of different antibodies, as @jbloom_lab points out:
But remember that our immune system has more than just neutralising antibodies in store, so none of this tells us just how much this variant is going to escape immunity and if it will mostly affect protection from infection or also severe disease.
Immune escape is not black-and-white, not yes or no, which is why the term immune erosion is generally better.
Transmissibility is harder to measure and we can read much less about this from a genome sequence, so for this experimental data and more real-world evidence is even more important.
Again, the little we know suggests there could be some advantage, but this is very uncertain.I am most wary of any pronouncements on whether this virus leads to more severe disease or deaths. There can be so many biases in the early data and we really don’t have the numbers to say anything this early on.
So as usual: Beware of anyone who is overly confident on anything about this variant right now.
There is a lot we need to find out.The only thing I know for sure is that I’m back to being a #covid19 variant reporter for now…
And all of this should underscore 2 points:
1. We are all in this together. It does not matter where a new variant pops up it will most likely end up affecting all of us. That’s one reason why the tools to track this virus and fight it need to be distributed equitably.
2. It’s a reminder that any place that has high transmission (like Germany right now) we really really need to drive down transmission.
As @firefox66 put it really well: “The variant is a spark that should not distract us from the fact that we are already in a burning house.”
Originally tweeted by Kai Kupferschmidt (@kakape) on November 26, 2021.