A new strain of #COVID19 has evolved in England. It's 70% better at spreading from person-to-person.

This is our punishment for not eradicating the disease over the summer. We gave it a chance to evolve, now it's more transmissible. https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-we-know-about-the-new-covid-19-strain-in-england-11608423416

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/netherlands-travel-ban-uk-flights-cancelled-covid-variant-b401639.html

Flights to the UK are being banned as we speak.

#N501Y

Europe should be doing all the things that China did to beat it in the spring, that is compulsory installation of covid-19 apps on your phone, travel lockdowns, confine people to their homes except for essential food shopping.

@BorisJohnson Just announced that communal worship will be allowed to continue in the new tier 4 lockdown https://www.gov.uk/guidance/tier-4-stay-at-home

Tier 4 contains too many exemptions. The virus doesn't make exemptions, it will spread through mosques and churches and then through homes and the few remaining workplaces that are open.

The problem is that the government doesn't have enough power to actually enforce China-style lockdown where they weld the doors to apartment buildings shut and arrest you on the spot if you are caught outside.

But that is what is needed to beat covid! And with the new transmissibility mutation, it will be even harder to beat it using eradication, and the fraction of people who need to be successfully vaccinated increases.

From March 2020:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Ddgry4k64oBZYfrHy/covid-19-points-of-leverage-travel-bans-and-eradication

This is the current picture of the virus across a selection of countries.

The best are China, Taiwan and New Zealand, where the number of new cases per day is less than 1 in 1 million.

The new strain is not any less deadly. It seems to be exactly the same.

There was some information going around that when transmissibility increases, lethality decreases. But that's only a tendency! It's not a law. In theory, both can go up at the same time.

The reason these two often go in opposite directions is that dead people usually don't walk around spreading viruses. So if a virus kills people, it loses a bit of transmission potential.

This doesn't really hold with #COVID19 though, as deaths take over a month!

The people that #Covid19 kills weren't going to spread it much more, and since only about 1% of cases are fatal anyway, very little transmission potential is lost.

We should therefore not expect covid-19 to mutate to be milder. It might, but only if we're lucky.