What I’ve Learned About Covid

DISCLAIMER:

This article is not completely original. This is sourced from the VOX Youtube channel about the COVID-19 Variants.

Original Video:

Why There Are So Many Coivd-19 Variants

Document CP’ed by Proxima Labs:

Corona Virus Update : ADVANTAGE MUTATIONS : Jun 2021

Share this message to anyone you know to spread the important message: How crucial, how important, it is to follow the Coivd-19 guidelines despite the relaxation on rules and restrictions. Thank you!

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On November 5th, 2020, the UK went into lockdown to control the spike in the number of COVID-19 cases. And looking at the November COVID-19 cases chart, it seemed to work. However, despite having the same lockdown protocols, Kent, an area just outside of London, cases didn’t seem to drop.

As early December approached, the drop in the number of COVID-19 cases led the country to relax their Covid restrictions. Until something happened.

There was a spike in Covid-19 cases. In fact a spike so high it almost doubled the height of the spike in November. It was at this time the scientists began realizing that somewhere in Kent, the virus had mutated in some way. The COVID-19 virus was more contagious and it was spreading. Scientists gave it a name, B.1.1.7 (B117), but by the time they gave it this name, it had already spread throughout south east England. Only two months later, it was in several different countries (USA, India, China, etc.). 

5 months passed, it was the most common type of the COVID-19 virus found in the United States. As more time passes, more and more variants of this COVID-19 alone have been emerging across the world.

A virus is pretty simple, it only wants to duplicate itself. A virus is really just a membrane that surrounds some genetic material. As VOX states that it's either DNA or RNA. This can basically be represented in a series of letters. Each one (DNA or RNA) basically contains the directions to how it duplicates itself. But because a virus is so simple, it can’t do it on its own. This is why viruses use hosts, and in this case, that host could be anyone or even you. It uses cells to copy the complex directions stored within itself over and over again. And eventually it will make a mistake. Going back to how each RNA or DNA string could be represented with a letter, the mistake could be that one letter was flipped around or replaced.

This mistake is a mutation, in which slightly alters the directions for how it copies itself. That changed virus is called a variant. Since viruses constantly go through this copying process. It's normal for them to change over time. Sometimes these changes are harmless and some even make the virus weaker, and slowly they disappear overtime. Though sometimes, the virus makes a change that gives it a slight advantage over us humans. This is what scientists started to notice with COVID-19 virus back in late 2020.

As scientists discovered specific mutations which allowed the COVID-19 viruses to enter cells better and bind with human receptors better. Covid viruses are covered with a sort of spike protein that they use to bind with human cells to infect them. However sometimes, those proteins aren’t a perfect fit for the human receptors, this is why some Covid viruses don’t always get past the human defences. But the B.1.1 variant, which scientists later renamed the Alpha variant, has multiple  mutations to the spike proteins. These mutations make it easier for the virus to bind with human receptors.

This mutation makes the virus more transmissible. Ultimately leading to it becoming a dominant variant of the COVID-19 virus.

If we look at a stream of the COVID-19 variants, we can see that there are 4 in total. These are considered the Variants of Concern by the World Health Organisation (because all of them are major world sweeping variants).

**Alpha : B.1.1.7 | Beta : B.1.351 | Gamma : P.1 | Delta : B.1.617.2**

All 4 variants all have mutations to the spike proteins. Delta, variant 4 and the most recent variant added, is known as the double mutant.

This is because Delta has two significant mutations we’ve seen before.

L452R or Epsilon (B.1.427 / 429) allows the virus to be extremely transmissible.

And E484Q, which is a mutation we’ve already seen in 2 variants already (Gamma and Beta but named E484K) makes it easier for the virus to reinfect people who already had COVID-19. This means that these two mutations may make it so it automatically dodges our natural immunity response. 

Luckily, the immunity response from the vaccine is much more effective than our natural immunity response. So though we may see variants that make our vaccines less effective, experts say it’s unlikely that there will be a mutation that completely evades our vaccine and natural immunity response. But it doesn’t mean it’s completely out of the idea.

“If you give a virus enough time and replicative cycles, it will sample a large evolutionary space and find a solution to the problem we’ve presented, which is vaccination and widespread immunity.” ,says VOX.  

So if we want to stop the variants.

We need to stop the virus.

The virus hasn’t evolved into something unrecognizable, the vaccines we have still protect against the variants, the trouble is that we aren’t getting the vaccines across the world fast enough to stop it. 

This means that it gives the virus enough time to change and ravage the areas in the world that are still waiting. This reminds us that the virus is not over. We need to stop the replication...

By stopping the virus.