What’d he think the origin is and what might come next? How about a one sentence TL;DL?
Every public place you visit, you need to do this. If you don't, you get fined. If the public place doesn't display one they can be fined so heavily they may end up out of business. You can go and do your own research about Germany and France and get back to us if you wish, with evidence of where they went wrong. That would be refreshing.
If there's a long standing pandemic where the contact tracing becomes crucial in fighting off the spread of infection (like the current one pandemic), I don't see why they don't just use gps tracking on phones.I already get regular notices from google to rate the place of business that I just visited. Why not expand on that to automatically register that you visited that place?It would cut out the middle man and would reduced objections to the tracking, as there would be fewer constant reminders of it.
I suppose there would be issues with people not bringing their phones with them. Those people would have to go the old fashioned write up your name and number on the clipboard route, I guess.
I'm pretty sure the reason why we didn't go down the GPS route was due to concerns about the invasiveness of the technology and how that may hinder compliance. As it stands there are all sorts of privacy protocols about the particular gov authorities that have access to the QR code data and how long it can be stored. In some cases the police have been prevented from using the data for criminal investigations. It can only be used by health authorities for contact tracing. That said, the system has worked very well. There is also a requirement for a fall back pen and paper system for those without cell phones. The pen and paper method is a pain in the ass but I've had use it occasionally when I've left my phone at home.
Ah yeah, the privacy issues. I can see that being an issue for many.And I agree that the system works very well in Korea. I can't think of another country that has been as effective at contact tracing as Korea.
1. Why not quickly develop an effective combat option to the delta strain when vaccinations show little to no effect preventing the SPREAD of the virus!
If there's a long standing pandemic where the contact tracing becomes crucial in fighting off the spread of infection (like the current one pandemic), I don't see why they don't just use gps tracking on phones.
Please tell me you're joking. See that upwards curve from June '21? Which population do think is most represented there? Vaccinated or unvaccinated?
I don't know much about the Korean system do they use QR codes?I'm talking about one state in Aus where it has been so effective we still have zero community spread of Covid 19.
Oh, I didn't realize you weren't here.Yeah, generally when you go to a cafe etc there is ideally a QR reader, a thermometer, a hand sanitizer pump thingy, and a clipboard (to enter time, temp, name, phone number and your town.Sometimes only the clipboard will be there.And occasionally the pump thingy will be there, but will be empty.And those thermometers often either don't work, or have never worked, or are just missing.Jokes aside, the system here works pretty well.
2. Why get a "booster" 3rd jab of the same engineered stuff that failed previously to vaccinate (google it).
3. The pharmaceutical industry is the #1 industry globally, a trillion-dollar profit bottom line, that is not allowed to be talked about many places: the elephant in the room.
I have always thought it naive to not at least question other accounts when the only highest-level (Level 4) virus research lab in China is in Wuhan. To question, to doubt,... is NOT to think either way... But is to wonder about possibilities and request more info!
Tegan Taylor: Hello, this is Coronacast, a daily podcast all about the coronavirus. I'm health reporter Tegan Taylor.Norman Swan: And I'm physician and journalist Dr Norman Swan. It's Friday, 15 October, 2021. And a very special Coronacast today.Tegan Taylor: Yes, Norman, we love you very much and you're a doctor and all that but we have a bigger, dare I say better, expert sitting here with us for Coronacast today.Norman Swan: Yes, this is radical but we are getting on somebody who actually knows what they're talking about.Tegan Taylor: And not to put too fine a point on it, he is kind of a big deal. We are talking about Professor Eddie Holmes, he is an evolutionary biologist who works with viruses including SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that this Coronacast is all about, at the University of Sydney. And, stick with us folks, it's a long episode today because there's so much to cover, we are going to talk about the origins of the virus, we are going to talk about variants, vaccines and where to from here. So let's just get straight into it.Norman Swan: Yes, and it should be said that Eddie is the person who released the viral genome to the world, which he got from a Chinese scientist.Tegan Taylor: No big deal.Norman Swan: Exactly, no big deal.Eddie, let's just start, because there's been this huge controversy about the virus, about where it originated, was it the Wuhan Institute of Virology, was it a lab, was it a bat? So where do you stand in terms of where the virus comes from?Eddie Holmes: So, as you well know, this is a topic of some debate. At the moment we know that there are pretty closely related viruses in bats from southern China and some other Southeast Asian countries. And just a couple of weeks ago the closest relative yet has been identified in a horseshoe bat called genus Rhinolophus, and it was from Laos in Southeast Asia, and they are the closest so far to SARS-CoV-2, I think it's about 96.8% similar in the genome sequence to the virus. That's still actually…you know, it may be 10+ years of evolution separate in that virus to SARS-CoV-2 but that's the closest one we've got so far.Now, quite how you get from that virus into a human…I mean, there must be some other closer viruses out there. Are they in other bats, are they in other animals, we don't really know yet, and we need to do more sampling of the ecology of these viruses in nature to try and work that out.Tegan Taylor: Is it unusual to take this long to find the origins of a virus or is this actually a pretty short timeframe in the realm of tracking down a virus's origins?Eddie Holmes: I would say it's kind of in the ballpark, it really depends. It took something like 10 years to find that HIV came from chimpanzees. We still don't know…hepatitis C virus, I'm sure you know that very well, huge public health problem, we don't know where that comes from still. There are viruses that are quite close in some animals, but the real ancestor is missing. So it all depends on…if we are lucky, this virus evolved in an animal market, we could have sampled it quickly. If we go back into the real wilds to find the ancestor, it could take a while. I know some people think that's kind of suspicious but I don't think there's anything untoward in not finding that yet.Norman Swan: Eddie, right at the beginning of this we spoke to a few evolutionary biologists, particularly people from the lab in Seattle, and they were pooh-poohing the impact of, if you like, the mutations on the virus. They were saying, look, the mutations are the mutations, but really it's human behaviour that changes this, not the new mutations in the virus. But that has not quite worked out that way.Eddie Holmes: No, it hasn't, and I must say if you had asked me that time I would have also been in the pooh-poohing camp as well, and I wrote papers saying the evolution, don't worry, nothing is going to happen. And I got it wrong. And I think the problem is this virus has actually evolved a lot more than most of us would have expected over the last 18 months or so. In particular…I mean, we all know about Delta, the Delta variant is just such an increase in infectivity. I certainly did not see that coming and most of my colleagues did not see that coming. So I think the virus has shown a greater capacity to evolve and change than most people thought was possible.Tegan Taylor: Why? Is it because of the scale of the spread, it's just had so many opportunities to mutate as it replicates?Eddie Holmes: Yes, I think it's partly that, I think it's a number of things. First of all, we have never seen anything quite like this virus before, because although we get new flu variants every so often and we've seen those, it's rare we have a virus that is new to which the human population…no one has ever seen it before, we are all completely susceptible, we all can get infected. So that's kind of like virgin territory, so it's partly that.Partly also I think we've never studied a virus, its evolution, this close up before. It's extraordinary detail. So for many years I've used the phrase 'we're watching virus evolution in real-time'. That was not really real-time at all, real-time was over a month or so. Now we are literally watching it on a daily basis. There are over 4 million complete genome sequences of the virus generated so far, it's amazing.So partly the reason why it's changing so much is we are actually watching it change so much, it's the first time we've ever done that. Third, I think we just didn't realise that the virus was actually…we think of coronaviruses as being conservative, very slowly evolving things, like common cold coronavirus, this one though is just more. We didn't expect it to be that much more adaptable really, so I think it was partly a combination of the new way we look at viruses, via genomics, and partly this virus is just a bit different.Norman Swan: You've got this extraordinary situation where the pressures on the virus around the world are quite similar, and you're getting very similar evolutionary adaptation, what they call convergent evolution. What are the evolutionary pressures here on in?Eddie Holmes: So this is really I think the key question, and I think we can divide the evolution of this virus into two phases. I think during 2020 and the first part of 2021, what you saw was probably just selection, just evolution for sheer infectivity, just the fastest one. It's like you want your Danny Ricciardo in your racing car, your Formula One, that's the one that wins. So evolution was going…because at that time until maybe the start of this year or so, most people were not infected, or been vaccinated, so there was actually not that much immunity in the population. So the virus wasn't challenged to infect people who had been infected in the past, who were immune, it was normally seeing people, meeting people by transmission who were not immune. So selection was just for sheer replication power.What's now going to happen is that as vaccination rates have raised dramatically, and Australia has done an amazing job in the last few months, as they've risen in Australia, and other countries too, the selection pressure on the virus is going to change, and we are no longer going to…the selection will not be just for sheer replication power, it's going to be for a virus that is able to evade that immune response, it's a different kind of thing. So your straight Formula One car isn't going to work anymore, it's more like going on a Paris to Dakar Rally, so you want a different kind of vehicle, better suspension, thicker wheels. It's a different kind of selection pressure. So quite what that's going to do to which virus will win from now on is a little bit hard to say, but it probably won't be one that's going to be just the best infecter, it's also going to be the one that is the best at invading the immune response, so allowing you to reinfect people who have got immunity. So we are going to get into that new phase of evolution now, if not very soon.Norman Swan: And vaccinologists say there has not been a situation in the world that we know of to date where a virus has mutated around a vaccine rather than natural antibodies, is that true?Eddie Holmes: It's very hard to tease apart exactly what drives viruses to escape vaccine coverage. So, for example, with influenza we know that every two or three years we need to update the vaccine because the virus has evolved a way around the vaccine that was used previously. The problem is, has the vaccine selected that or the virus itself infecting people? It's actually quite hard to tease those two things apart.So to me the question is not so much will it evolve around the vaccine, it's will it evolve around immunity, and I think it will because if selection is strong enough, the virus will…because not everyone…immunity is not perfect, this is not what they call sterilising immunity, so if you are vaccinated or you are infected, your immune response, you are not immune for life, your immune response wanes through time. So the virus, because of that, because it's leaky, that will allow selection to work, that will drive it forward. So I don't think we're going to get into a situation where vaccination will stop the evolution of the virus, I think that's not going to happen.Norman Swan: Then just using the influenza analogy, influenza has pandemic potential, in other words to make a leap in evolution to which we are not immune. Has COVID-19, the SARS-CoV-2 virus, got more pandemic potential in it, in other words to create a second pandemic with a new version?Eddie Holmes: Flu is an analogy, it's not the perfect model. There are differences, you need to be a little bit careful. But there are some things you can draw on. So in flu, pandemics are caused by new bits of the virus coming in from animals every so often, and that's often called antigenic shift, and what that means is a new bit of the virus genetic material or gene gets into a human strain. They all come from birds ultimately, so a bit of bird virus somehow gets into a human strain, like from chickens, and that causes a pandemic. And we get those every…it's not really a timescale but the last one was in…we had swine flu in 2009, before that 1968, before that 1957, before that 1918, so they are actually very irregular.Seasonal flu, which is a different thing, that is the year on year on seasonal spread of the virus. The virus gradually evolves through time. So every few weeks or months it changes a little bit its antigenic structure to evade immunity. So for a new pandemic strain to appear in SARS-CoV-2, Covid, that will probably need, again, a new animal source to bring it in, I suspect.What we are more likely to see is the seasonal influenza sort of thing where the virus will just gradually change its genetic structure because of selection. So it will change its surface proteins and that will allow it to evade immunity and that will then infect more hosts. But what I doubt will happen, Norman, is we will get by that kind of gradual evolution, a strain that no one is then protected by, that everyone is susceptible. I don't think that will be the case.I suspect even if the virus evolves in a kind of standard way, even if it generates a new variant, there will be enough or some residual immunity in the population to protect a bit against that. That's what happens in flu. In flu, the first virus you ever see as a child, that protects you still through time against that virus happening in the future. So, amazingly, people who were infected back in 1918 with influenza still had some immunity to swine flu in 2009 because actually it's the same virus lineage many years later.So I don't think this continual evolution process the virus goes through, this year on year on evolution that we will get with SARS-CoV-2, I don't think that will make a strain that is completely evasive to everything.Tegan Taylor: So Eddie, we told our audience yesterday that we were having you on as a guest today and asked them to send in their questions, and they have. Nicole is asking; is it true that unvaccinated people are the ones in whom mutations will develop and spread?Eddie Holmes: It's a very good question actually, it's quite complicated, I'm going to try and give a proper answer. Yes. So virus will evolve in all the population. So people who are unvaccinated, clearly there will be more transmission because there's nothing to protect them. Mutations will take place. Those mutations though, when they do appear, when they evolve, they will be subject to a different sort of selection pressure to those that appear in the immunised population. So the immunised population will massively reduce transmission, but there will still be some evolution, there will still be some selection because you are not completely protecting…mutations that do arise will be different to those than in the unvaccinated population because immunity will become the driver of selection.Tegan Taylor: So on that, Christopher is asking; we know that Delta is currently the dominant strain. Is there evidence from around the world of other variants of concern emerging, and any evidence of vaccine resistant variants evolving in places with high vaccination rates?Eddie Holmes: I don't know about vaccine resistance, not that I've noticed carefully. At the moment we have a number of these variants of concern—Alpha, Beta, Delta, Gamma—and Delta is the winner. We've had some others that have come along, there was Mu and there was Lambda. I think in the US there was a straight kind of shootout between Delta and Lambda and Delta won because Delta is so much more infectious. So they are in the variants of concern. There are also the variants of interest that are being monitored. And I think and now there are things called variants of monitoring as well, a third set.So the good news is we now have the genomic tools by which scientists all over the world…and Australia is actually doing a very good job in this…are monitoring the evolution of these viruses very carefully to see whether something is going to come up that's going to replace Delta. At the moment I don't think there's any evidence that there is at this moment, but who knows. All it takes is a certain combination of mutations will appear, that gives a virus the ability to evade the immune response, bang, off it goes. So that could well happen. But again, the good news is now at least we can actually watch it very, very quickly, and with the vaccines that we have, we have potential to update those pretty speedily too.Norman Swan: Eddie, it's been a pleasure.Eddie Holmes: All mine actually, thank you.Tegan Taylor: Professor Eddie Holmes is an evolutionary biologist who works with viruses at the University of Sydney. This has been Coronacast for another week, if you've got questions and comments go to abc.net.au/coronacast.Norman Swan: And we'll see you Monday.Tegan Taylor: See you then.
