When high positive Covid-19 infections are a worry.7 Jul 2021 14:29
The Covid-19 virus has 30,000 nucleotides. Imagine a chain with 30,000 links. Lets say the manufacture of the chains is less than perfect as you get some with an extra link and others missing one and occasionally a link is completely different. Along that chain a lot of issues do not matter but so far around 15 were critical (4 gave the major variants and 11 others). The fear is that a 16th comes along by chance and that it escapes vaccine efficacy.
Now a mutation happens after it has passed through around 400 cycles of different people and we know most mutations by far along that 30,000 sequence chain do not undermine the vaccines. When daily infections like 5,000 a day there is only a tiny minute chance of that 16th variant concern happening. However, when it hits around 80,000 infections a day there is a 1 in 10 chance say of striking that mutation. After 10 days and 800,000 infections we have a risk of single person in England carrying a dangerous variant. Now a proportion may not infect somebody else for a variety of reasons as they may be heavily symptomatic. Lets say its a 50% chance to get to another person and spreads further. It would mean 1.6M infected to generate an escape route. Lets say we are 50,000 a day on 19 July and we hit 80,000 by 1 August. It is likely that it would take to around 3rd to 10th September to discover an escaped mutation in smallish numbers in the population has actually happened. Also at this time a hospital local to the variant reports high numbers of admissions. As long as the public realise the importance of all this and helping to keep infection rates per day well below say 80,000 a day then the vaccines has a chance to hold out with support from Covid-19 therapies as we head into October to December. The Government in Parliament today would not give a case rate per day where there is a concern. My own calculations may not be right, but it does help give a broad idea on why that figure is so important and how a clearer message needs to be conveyed to the public. I have written this to help those trying to decide when to mask up or not and why and how we all might help keep our vaccines against Covid-19 useful.