BC SOCIETY
Saved by @ThomassRichards

1/ Today has brought a lot of news about 'variants', as we discover community transmission of B.1.351 (SA variant) in the UK.

But some of the people who study these genomes have increasingly started focusing on a different concept: 'constellations', which may be more useful.

 2/ We're actually all using 'variant' wrong anyway – we're using it to refer to a 'lineage'. A lineage is a set of viruses descended from a common ancestor. All B.1.1.7 (UK variant) viruses descend from an infection that probably occurred in August or September.
3/ But what makes this lineage practically important is that it carries a set of mutations which make it more transmissible.

I.e. we don't really care about the ancestry in itself.
4/ For example, one of the mutations that we think is important to B.1.1.7's faster transmission is called N501Y.
5/ It turns out that a lot of the lineages identified as important recently, in Brazil, South Africa, and the UK, have mutations such as N501Y in common (figure adapted from https://t.co/lpJeW0GGnU)
6/ You can see in the table that the lineage originating in South Africa, and those originating in Brazil, have another mutation, called E484K, in common.
7/ Today PHE's Technical Briefing 5 reveals that a small number of B.1.1.7 (UK lineage) genomes have recently been found which newly carry the E484K mutation, which had previously been seen in these South African and Brazilian lineages.
8/ This shows why thinking about constellations is useful. A 'constellation' is just a set of shared mutations carried by viruses, irrespective of ancestry.
9/ Should we treat B.1.1.7+E484K cases as less concerning than viruses descending from those that originated in South Africa?
10/ We don't know the answer to that one way or another. We don't know to what extent E484K is the key mutation to driving the properties of a lineage, and we don't know how this mutation might interact with other mutations B.1.1.7 carries.
11/ But increasingly, it's going to be important to focus on the mutations that viruses carry, and understanding what effect these have, rather than simply focusing on their ancestry.
12/ From everything we have seen across the continents, E484K seems significant, and we should be very alert to its emergence in another lineage with high transmissibility. (There's every indication that the public health authorities are alert).
13/ Here's some more on constellations: https://t.co/dOzmEG5Vju
(I regret saying the use of 'variant' was 'wrong' above, it's all very fuzzy!)

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1.Reactive versus proactive and goal oriented.

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2.Mitigation (slowing transmission) versus elimination (stopping transmission)

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Knowing whether old ideas are more likely to be good requires understanding whether conditions have changed in important ways.

Horse archery was an amazing method of warfare for over a thousand years...then people invented guns, and suddenly this great idea that had stood the test of time became obsolete.

Then again, when underlying conditions don't change much, tried-and-true approaches are probably better.

"Learning the lessons of history" usually just means assuming ergodicity and stationarity in an informal time-series model...

(end)
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Southerners wrote songs about Warrington, formed peace movements because of IRA violence - but I can’t point to any mainstream effort to oppose/understand who the glenane gang, or Shankill butchers were, care about Loughinisland, state violence, &collusion.
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They were and are revolted by SF glorifying murder but dont know or care about the deaths of catholics here. As I’ve seen the apathy to the life my parents lived, and the fear I grew up with, I always make it understood I’m Irish but from the north. Because it’s important

Showing absolutely no interest in the murder of the people in the areas SF are elected to represent is really selectively deciding whose lives you think are worth anything. I doubt anyone south of Louth Monaghan or Cavan could tell you or care about the Reavey brothers

There was and is no hand wringing about children being shot in the fields by soldiers in front of their parents or hunted down in their own house and killed in front of their families- where were the marches, the songs, the movements?

“But Sinn Fein said this”- is of zero comfort to victims of state or loyalist violence and you are actually framing their loved ones murders in such a way that you’re almost making them partially culpable for their own fate or excusing it somehow when it’s nothing to do with SF
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Telling a denialist in May that we shouldn't open bars back up = telling a maximalist in February that we should open schools back up.

Look, folks, the math is straightforward. ~13% of Americans have been vaccinated as of this

And the 7 day average continues to rise; we're approach 2 million vaccine doses per day. Meaning that we'll double that ~13% much faster than the two months it took us to get there.


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and the most common subclass of these problems is the one where you have 3 items/animals to cross with.
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