Dec 22, 2020 01:33 AM
Two people found guilty over deaths of 39 Vietnamese migrants in the United Kingdom
https://www.sbs.com.au/news/two-people-f...ed-kingdom
INTRO: Two people have been found guilty of manslaughter and people smuggling over the horrific death of 39 Vietnamese migrants in the back of a lorry in England last year. The bodies of the men and women were found inside a sealed container near London in October 2019 after suffocating in sweltering temperatures. Lorry driver Eamonn Harrison, 24, from Northern Ireland, and Romanian national Gheorghe Nica, 43, were found guilty of 39 counts of manslaughter by a London court on Tuesday. They are expected to be sentenced early in January... (MORE)
Mutant coronavirus in the United Kingdom sets off alarms, but its importance remains unclear
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/12/...ns-unclear
EXCERPT: . . . Scientists, meanwhile, are hard at work trying to figure out whether B.1.1.7 is really more adept at human-to-human transmission—not everyone is convinced yet—and if so, why. They’re also wondering how it evolved so fast. B.1.1.7 has acquired 17 mutations all at once, a feat never seen before. “There’s now a frantic push to try and characterize some of these mutations in the lab,” says Andrew Rambaut, a molecular evolutionary biologist at the University of Edinburgh.
[...] scientists have never seen the virus acquire more than a dozen mutations seemingly at once. They think it happened during a long infection of a single patient that allowed SARS-CoV-2 to go through an extended period of fast evolution, with multiple variants competing for advantage.
[...] A fortunate coincidence helped show that B.1.1.7 (also called VUI-202012/01, for the first “variant under investigation” in December 2020), appears to be spreading faster than other variants in the United Kingdom. ... In a press conference on Saturday, Chief Science Adviser Patrick Vallance said B.1.1.7, which first appeared in a virus isolated on 20 September, accounted for about 26% of cases in mid-November. “By the week commencing the ninth of December, these figures were much higher,” he said. “So, in London, over 60% of all the cases were the new variant.” Johnson added that the slew of mutations may have increased the virus’ transmissibility by 70%.
Christian Drosten, a virologist at Charité University Hospital in Berlin, says that was premature. “There are too many unknowns to say something like that,” he says. For one thing, the rapid spread of B.1.1.7 might be down to chance. Scientists previously worried that a variant that spread rapidly from Spain to the rest of Europe—confusingly called B.1.177—might be more transmissible, but today they think it is not; it just happened to be carried all over Europe by travelers who spent their holidays in Spain. Something similar might be happening with B.1.1.7, says Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at Georgetown University. Drosten notes that the new mutant also carries a deletion in another viral gene, ORF8, that previous studies suggest might reduce the virus’ ability to spread.
But further reason for concern comes from South Africa, where scientists have sequenced genomes in three provinces where cases are soaring: Eastern Cape, Western Cape, and KwaZulu Natal. They identified a lineage separate from the U.K. variant that also has a N501Y mutation in the spike gene. “We found that this lineage seems to be spreading much faster,” says Tulio de Oliveira, a virologist at the University of KwaZulu-Natal whose work first alerted U.K. scientists to the importance of N501Y. (A preprint of their results on the strain, which they are calling 501Y.V2, will be released on Monday, de Oliveira says.)
Another worry is B.1.1.7 could cause more severe disease. There is anecdotal evidence that the South African variant may be doing that in young people and those who are otherwise healthy, says John Nkengasong, director of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention. “It’s concerning, but we really need more data to be sure.” The African Task Force for Coronavirus will convene an emergency meeting to discuss the issue on Monday, Nkengasong says.
Still, B.1.177, the strain from Spain, offers a cautionary lesson, says virologist Emma Hodcroft of the University of Basel. U.K. scientists initially thought it had a 50% higher mortality rate, but that turned out to be “purely messy, biased data in the early days,” she says.
[...] Getting definitive answers could take months. ... But scientists say B.1.1.7 may already be much more widespread. Researchers in the Netherlands have found it in a sample from one patient taken in early December ... The evolutionary process that led to B.1.1.7 may also occur elsewhere. With vaccines being rolled out, the selective pressure on the virus is going to change ... “Whatever enabled the B.1.1.7 lineage to emerge is likely going on in other parts of the world...” (MORE - details)
RELATED (scivillage): World panicking, going crazy over UK's new coronavirus strain
https://www.sbs.com.au/news/two-people-f...ed-kingdom
INTRO: Two people have been found guilty of manslaughter and people smuggling over the horrific death of 39 Vietnamese migrants in the back of a lorry in England last year. The bodies of the men and women were found inside a sealed container near London in October 2019 after suffocating in sweltering temperatures. Lorry driver Eamonn Harrison, 24, from Northern Ireland, and Romanian national Gheorghe Nica, 43, were found guilty of 39 counts of manslaughter by a London court on Tuesday. They are expected to be sentenced early in January... (MORE)
Mutant coronavirus in the United Kingdom sets off alarms, but its importance remains unclear
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/12/...ns-unclear
EXCERPT: . . . Scientists, meanwhile, are hard at work trying to figure out whether B.1.1.7 is really more adept at human-to-human transmission—not everyone is convinced yet—and if so, why. They’re also wondering how it evolved so fast. B.1.1.7 has acquired 17 mutations all at once, a feat never seen before. “There’s now a frantic push to try and characterize some of these mutations in the lab,” says Andrew Rambaut, a molecular evolutionary biologist at the University of Edinburgh.
[...] scientists have never seen the virus acquire more than a dozen mutations seemingly at once. They think it happened during a long infection of a single patient that allowed SARS-CoV-2 to go through an extended period of fast evolution, with multiple variants competing for advantage.
[...] A fortunate coincidence helped show that B.1.1.7 (also called VUI-202012/01, for the first “variant under investigation” in December 2020), appears to be spreading faster than other variants in the United Kingdom. ... In a press conference on Saturday, Chief Science Adviser Patrick Vallance said B.1.1.7, which first appeared in a virus isolated on 20 September, accounted for about 26% of cases in mid-November. “By the week commencing the ninth of December, these figures were much higher,” he said. “So, in London, over 60% of all the cases were the new variant.” Johnson added that the slew of mutations may have increased the virus’ transmissibility by 70%.
Christian Drosten, a virologist at Charité University Hospital in Berlin, says that was premature. “There are too many unknowns to say something like that,” he says. For one thing, the rapid spread of B.1.1.7 might be down to chance. Scientists previously worried that a variant that spread rapidly from Spain to the rest of Europe—confusingly called B.1.177—might be more transmissible, but today they think it is not; it just happened to be carried all over Europe by travelers who spent their holidays in Spain. Something similar might be happening with B.1.1.7, says Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at Georgetown University. Drosten notes that the new mutant also carries a deletion in another viral gene, ORF8, that previous studies suggest might reduce the virus’ ability to spread.
But further reason for concern comes from South Africa, where scientists have sequenced genomes in three provinces where cases are soaring: Eastern Cape, Western Cape, and KwaZulu Natal. They identified a lineage separate from the U.K. variant that also has a N501Y mutation in the spike gene. “We found that this lineage seems to be spreading much faster,” says Tulio de Oliveira, a virologist at the University of KwaZulu-Natal whose work first alerted U.K. scientists to the importance of N501Y. (A preprint of their results on the strain, which they are calling 501Y.V2, will be released on Monday, de Oliveira says.)
Another worry is B.1.1.7 could cause more severe disease. There is anecdotal evidence that the South African variant may be doing that in young people and those who are otherwise healthy, says John Nkengasong, director of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention. “It’s concerning, but we really need more data to be sure.” The African Task Force for Coronavirus will convene an emergency meeting to discuss the issue on Monday, Nkengasong says.
Still, B.1.177, the strain from Spain, offers a cautionary lesson, says virologist Emma Hodcroft of the University of Basel. U.K. scientists initially thought it had a 50% higher mortality rate, but that turned out to be “purely messy, biased data in the early days,” she says.
[...] Getting definitive answers could take months. ... But scientists say B.1.1.7 may already be much more widespread. Researchers in the Netherlands have found it in a sample from one patient taken in early December ... The evolutionary process that led to B.1.1.7 may also occur elsewhere. With vaccines being rolled out, the selective pressure on the virus is going to change ... “Whatever enabled the B.1.1.7 lineage to emerge is likely going on in other parts of the world...” (MORE - details)
RELATED (scivillage): World panicking, going crazy over UK's new coronavirus strain