B.C.'s provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry gets her first dose of the covid-19 vaccine. (Photo: B.C. government flickr)
For the holidays this year, humanity has been gifted both the very good and the very bad. On the very good side, two vaccines with the potential to decimate covid-19 are being rolled out around the world. On the very bad side, a new covid-19 variant has erupted and it appears to be more contagious than the virus we were already dealing with.
The new variant has a couple of interesting properties, Jeffrey Barrett, director of the SARS-CoV-2 Genomics Initiative at the Wellcome Sanger Institute said during a World Health Organization panel.
“The virus changes all the time and that’s perfectly natural, but usually it happens quite slowly and in those 30,000 letters of RNA we see one or two new mutations happen at a time,” Barrett said. “In this new variant, we saw 23 all at once, so that’s very unusual. It’s essentially never been seen in this pandemic.”
At the same time, scientists started to see the new variant spread very quickly, causing alarm.
There is no evidence the new strain causes more severe illness, he said.
The spread of the new variant led many countries, including Canada, to ban flights from the United Kingdom, even though the new strain may already be here.
B.C.’s provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry said it is still unknown if the vaccines or testing will be affected by the new variant.
"It's worrisome to me that it seems to be spreading more quickly," she said.
On the plus side, Barrett said it’s “an amazing achievement” that scientists have been sharing data about the new variant so quickly.
“That’s a rate of scientific progress that is truly amazing and I think a real benefit for humanity,” Barrett said.
While we wait and see what effects this new variant has on our lives and the pandemic, here are other notable events from this holiday week:
- U.S. president-elect Joe Biden got his first dose of the vaccine and encouraged others to do the same in a video.
- Dr. Henry also got the Pfizer vaccine and said that after one dose it is about 80 per cent effective, especially in the short term. She said the second dose makes immunity more long lasting.
- Dr. Henry wrote a book about the first few weeks of the covid-19 pandemic that will be released this spring. It’s a personal story about what she and her sister went through in March. She will donate her advance money to an organization called First Book Canada.
- B.C.’s opioid crisis continues unabated, with 153 people dying from drug overdoses in November. Comparatively, 178 British Columbians died from covid-19 during that same period, my records show. There’s no comparison in the amount of attention given one versus the other.
- The Moderna vaccine was approved in Canada on December 23, 2020. This is the second vaccine to be approved and is easier to transport than the Pfizer vaccine, so can be sent to more rural communities. The first doses are expected to arrive in B.C. next week.
- Three mink on a second farm in the Fraser Valley died and later tested positive for covid-19, the B.C. government said in a news release. Earlier this month, mink and employees on another farm also tested positive. Testing showed the virus had spread from the humans to the mink in the first case, but in this latest case, no workers have tested positive and it is unknown how the mink got the virus.
- What are you most looking forward to in a post-covid world? According to a poll from the Angus Reid Institute, people in B.C. are most looking forward to hugging their loved ones (51%) while people in Quebec want to go out for dinner (45%). Manitoba residents want to see older people they have been unable to see. Notably, 20 per cent of those surveyed said they never expect life to go back to how it was before the pandemic.
This time next week, it will be New Year’s Day. May 2021 bring better things.
To make sure you never miss a post, click to subscribe.
Comments