Hancock's flights of misdirection #Covid #Covid-G #Covid-GR #COVID-GH #COVID-V #COVID-S #COVID-L #COVID-O

 

If I hadn't been writing my recent novel, I doubt whether I would have stumbled across this recent set of science. It is from Daniele Mercatelli and Federico M. Giorgi and was written up in Daily Science last August. 

They looked at a wide bunch of COVID cases and sequenced the genomes. And guess what? They found seven variants of COVID. There was the original Wuhan one and six others, including the three G clades with are referred to as G, GH and GR and create around 75% of the COVID infections in Europe. Check out the graphs below to see the distribution of the COVID variants. Now Matt Hancock has chosen today to release information about 'a new COVID Type' which he implies is ravaging the south east of England. He claims it has just been found by UK's world leading scientists. 

I can't help thinking he is telling fibs to get off detention. Why not tell everyone about the various types - back up his findings with some science? Because the variants have all been around since the first UK lockdown. Some of the variations are unable to create the spike proteins. The Wuhan variant isn't even the main one in play now. It all changed in February.

Analysis of 48,635 SARS-CoV-2 genomic sequences. Think of it like a mag tape reader reading blocks of data, delimited with tape headers, block headers and then chains of actual data. Then squirt some oil and iron filings into the heads to create some distortions.

A load of fairly predictable transcription errors occur. Sometimes a block gets skipped or accidentally misread. Then in the world of Messenger RNA (like a mag tape) the genomic sequence can be messed up. 

Genomes have 4 neucleotides: U C A G. It only takes a few Cs to be converted to Ts (Terminators) or As to Gs and it all starts to look different. Fortunately there are only a few common mistranslates, as follows:

or, graphically, by region.

In particular, clade G, prevalent in Europe, carries a D614G mutation in the Spike protein, which is responsible for the initial interaction of the virus with the host human cell.  Other interesting variants are clade V (variant of the ORF3a coding protein NS3-G251), and clade S (variant ORF8-L84S)

The G clade has three variants G, GH, GR and that makes up 75% of the population of the virus. (See the Europe chart at top)

Within a 10% variation, there is a massive prevalence of single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) over short insertion/deletion events (indels) worldwide and in every continent. 

Ignoring the crud, you get SNP and SNP_silent as by far the biggest variable affecting the chain and creating the majority of the common variations. So look, Matt, even within the current pandemic, your NHS is handling the seven variants, but with G as the strident one and ironically the Case Zero 'S' type almost at zero now. Mid Feb was when the two extra Gs split out GH and GR. GR is now the largest and G the second, In Europe, all the Gs account for around 75-80% of cases. Then L and V.

So I'm worried now that you are running spin. Announcing the 'new variant' on the same day as London Tier 3 to run some deflection? My questions are whether you know about this stuff and are doing it deliberately? - not good - or whether you don't know or understand this stuff and are doing it unwittingly? - not good also. There was something in the manifesto about taking back control. I'm not convinced.