Well, if the variant hits the US Trump will be taking about the “British” virus next.
By all accounts Covid has exceeded Trump’s limited attention span at the moment and he’s officially “bored” with it.
If ever there were two people more fundamentally unsuited to high office it has to be Trump and Johnson.
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It seems that access to the PM’s in box, let alone in person, is limited so quite possible there is a stack of undelivered briefings in Carrie’s dustbin,
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I don’t believe a word Johnson says. Or Hancock. Et al.
Of course there’s no question that the virus mutates. The more transmission, the more potential mutation. But the govt knew about this particular strain in September and did nothing for 3 months despite being urged to do so by respected epidemiologists and scientists, thus transmission continued and increased. So they also knew about it when they made the rules about bubbles and 5 days of festivities. I’m suggesting Johnson needed to have a very good reason to do a sudden U turn and introduce Tier 4 for millions of people. So they announced an alarming new “mutant strain” which is “out of control”.
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" Christian Drosten, a leading German virologist, said he expected the new strain was already in circulation in Germany, but added that he was “everything but worried” about the viral mutation at the moment.
The scientific data around N501Y was still unclear, Drosten told the broadcaster Deutschlandfunk on Monday. Claims that the strain was 70% more transmissible appeared to be an estimate for now, he said, and would need to be verified by British scientists over the course of this week.
Drosten said: “The question is: is this virus being boosted by a coming new wave in the region concerned [south-east England], or is this virus responsible for creating this wave in the first place? That’s an important difference.”
Drosten said the strain had also been detected in other countries such as the Netherlands, where it did not appear to have multiplied in a significantly more rapid way. “I am open to new scientific insights, and in science there are always surprises, but I am everything but worried in this respect,” he said.
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