Is this all the UK variant, or also South Africa?

Some months ago, everyone was annoyed when Trump talked about the Chinese virus but now it is fine to mention the UK and South-African variants

I think it was both, with the UK variant more prevalent.

It’s not surprising considering most of the Brit skiers flew into Geneva and then dissipated from there. Plenty of opportunity to infect people along the way.

Mostly the British variant, I think there are only a couple of cases of the South African one in Switzerland so far.

Trump could have referred to it as COVID or the coronavirus, like most other people. He chose not to. For one thing, that keeps the blame focused on China rather than on his own (mis)handling of a pandemic and the fact that he was trying to convince Americans that it's "no big deal."

With the UK and SA mutations, it's necessary to use those terms to distinguish between the two.

A short break before Holiday-superspreading and british ultracovid kick in.

I propose to call it ultracovid. Or maybe tremendocovid. Or simply Big Covid.

Which has now prompted the VD authorities to enlarge the quarantine rules. So not only is it the household, but now enlarged to second circle of contacts, requiring them to quarantine for 10 days as well. But good luck with enforcing that...track and trace is a joke here, ditto with quarantine from what I've seen as well.

https://www.vd.ch/toutes-les-actuali...s-de-quaranta/

And these 12 VD cases are just the tip of the iceberg it seems. As I understand, BAG tests only 500 cases a week for the variant to follow its progression. So with about 4,000 cases a day positive, extrapolating indicates a much greater number of positive variant in circulation.

Big Covid!
Better phrase than mutant covid.


You're quite right, BigCov is just warming up.

It's absurd, and would be hilarious were it not so serious. We're so tuned into avoiding causing offense, that whilst we concern ourselves over the name of the virus, China has blocked the entry of a WHO sent to investigate the origins of the virus.

There is an official name for the virus, COVID-19, but so far as I know there are no agreed official names for the UK and South-African variants?

Actually there are names for both. But they’re an impossible to remember bunch of letters and numbers.

I did say agreed official names, the variants have different bunches of letters and numbers depending on each countries numbering systems.

Just to add some perspective. More people have died in Hiking accidents (54) than number of Covid fatalities for under 50yrs olds (32).

Every life lost is saddening but this figure is so low it highlights the appalling approach currently adopted.

Passt... COVID-19 is the disease. The virus that causes the disease is SARS-CoV-2.

The South African variant is referred to by literally everybody as just that, and the UK variant is also known by the country where it was first identified. Technically the South African version is named 501.V2 and the UK one is B.1.1.7. The South African variant is considered to be the more worrisome in terms of vaccine efficiency.

nice data point. but you'd help your cause if you:
a) added a source
b) added data for over 50s too

The graph of the total weekly deaths in Switzerland was completed for 2020. It is going down -- I hope this means that the second wave if going down. When looking at the published daily Covid deaths, little is understandable about these numbers (such as what was the cause of each death). But the total weekly number of deaths was systematically collected over the years, and it is very interesting to follow.

https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/en/home...ses-death.html

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Rule of thumb is that the number of deaths usually follows the case numbers by about 2-3 weeks. At the moment new cases appears to be relatively flat, I imagine this could change if the new more contagious UK strain of the virus really starts to spread here.

Number of reported Covid deaths does follow the number of infections by about 2 weeks.

The problem with the reported number of Covid deaths — we don’t know how it is collected, so it is difficult to interpret and compare it even with the wave 1 numbers. Possibly every dead person is being checked for Covid, is this how these numbers are collected? I am not sure. What would be really interesting to see is the number of deaths caused by Covid, but we don’t have this.

Let’s see if the total number of weekly deaths keeps going down in the next weeks.

I was curious how long exactly it took for the UK mutation to spread in the London area and replace the old virus, as mutations often do, I guess. So I looked it up and found the following article, dated Dec. 20th:

"It was first detected in September. In November around a quarter of cases in London were the new variant. This reached nearly two-thirds of cases in mid-December."

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-55388846

Of course, though, the mutation probably existed there for quite a while before it was officially detected.

So we really have no idea what the situation is going to be like here a month or two from now, and especially if these mutations continue to spread and replace the old virus. Although the numbers here have flattened, they are still very high. And I don't think we should be basing our expectations for the future on the present or the past, in terms of the rates of new infections, etc. -- and particularly not until we have some idea of how quickly those mutations will spread here.