The team at the @seattleflustudy have sequenced the genome the #COVID19 community case reported yesterday from Snohomish County, WA, and have posted the sequence publicly to gisaid.org. There are some enormous implications here. 1/9
Trevor Bedford
5,265 posts
Trevor Bedford
@trvrb
Scientist @fredhutch, studying viruses, evolution and immunity. Collection of #COVID19 threads here: bedford.io/misc/twitter/
- I know all the discussion is about a possible "2nd wave", but I've found this odd given that we haven't finished the first one. I would think quite possible that, nationally, we're in for a scenario of a long plateau. 1/10
- There is a lot of Twitter chatter surrounding a rumor that circulation of #COVID19 in California in fall 2019 has resulted in herd immunity. This is empirically not the case. COVID-19 was first introduced into the USA in Jan/Feb 2020. 1/18
- I've been mulling over the @MRC_Outbreak modeling report on #COVID19 mitigation and suppression strategies since it was posted on March 16. Although mitigation through social distancing may not solve things I believe we can bring this epidemic under control. 1/19
- With #COVID19 vaccine efficacy of ~95%, I'm looking forward to vaccine distribution in 2021 bringing the pandemic under control. However, I'm concerned that we'll see antigenic drift of SARS-CoV-2 and may need to update the strain used in the vaccine with some regularity. 1/18
- Replying to @trvrbThe world should be immensely grateful to @Tuliodna, @ceri_news, @nicd_sa, the Network for Genomics Surveillance in South Africa and the Botswana Harvard HIV Reference Laboratory for discovering this variant and immediately alerting to its existence. 16/16
- After ~10 months of relative quiescence we've started to see some striking evolution of SARS-CoV-2 with a repeated evolutionary pattern in the SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern emerging from the UK, South Africa and Brazil. 1/19
- This is a thread about how to interpret the seemingly sudden appearance of #COVID19 across the much of the US in the past week with some back-of-the-envelop calculations for number of current infections. 1/13
- There have been a number of overview threads on the emerging variant designated as @pangonetwork lineage B.1.1.529, @nextstrain clade 21K and @WHO Variant of Concern Omicron. I'm not going to attempt to be comprehensive here, but will highlight a few aspects of the data. 1/16
- Replying to @trvrb and @seattleflustudyI believe we're facing an already substantial outbreak in Washington State that was not detected until now due to narrow case definition requiring direct travel to China. 6/9
- We're now starting to see the evolution of new potentially impactful sublineages of Omicron with particular focus on mutations at spike residue 452. Here, I'd like to highlight lineages B.2.12.1 in New York, as well as BA.4 and BA.5 in South Africa. 1/17
- As #COVID19 spread, we continually heard "we're all in this together" as an expression of solidarity. This rings hollow when a fraction of our society faces state-sanctioned violence. We must fix this. #BlackLivesMatter
