As horrific as #COVID19 looks right now, it is almost certainly about to get worse—

“I’m very very concerned that we’ve now gone from a virus that we could control to a virus that we really can’t, unless we do something very dramatic,” said @K_G_Andersen. https://www.statnews.com/2021/01/14/more-infectious-variants-could-make-things-much-worse/

2) “They’ve raced through South Africa, the United Kingdom, and, increasingly, elsewhere, and now, new, more infectious variants of the coronavirus have gained toeholds in the United States.

3) “If they take off here — which, with their transmission advantages, they will, unless Americans rapidly put a brake on their spread — it will detonate something of a bomb in the already deep, deep hole the country must dig out of to end the crisis.

4) “In other countries, scientists fear the variants will reignite outbreaks in places where the virus has already been tamped down. But in the U.S. the variants could accelerate what’s already exponential spread in certain areas, and make reining in epidemic all more difficult.

5) Here is my earlier thread on the Brazil discovered variant, now called P1 variant. It has the worrisome E484k mutation. https://twitter.com/drericding/status/1348606324901359619

6) experts interviewed at Science magazine are also very worried. https://twitter.com/drericding/status/1350271703079931904

7) there is a #COVID19 crisis in Manaus. Very worrisome mutation brewing there. https://twitter.com/drericding/status/1350039932090376193

8) Dr Tedros, a normally conservative guy, who is head of WHO, is even sounding the alarm of the Brazil variant of #SARSCoV2 https://twitter.com/drericding/status/1348710699036516355