Yea. Gamma was the dominant strain in Brazill, Luxembourg, Chile, Argentina, and a few other places in early-to-mid 2021, but never become the dominant strain in the US. Similarly for Lambda in Peru, Mu in Colombia, 20B/S:732A in Mexico, 20A/S:439K in Slovenia, 20E in Lithuania, and a handful of other strains in some other countries. This is all from Covariants.org. Many of these countries do roughly as much sequencing as SA does, so it seems like an appropriate reference class for thinking about Omicron.
What fraction of these fizzled out because they were displaced by a fitter variant vs just not spreading further? That seems very important for figuring out how much to freak out
To be clear, I’m not proposing a bet that no newly emerging variants are going to be consequential. I’m interesting in making a much narrower claim about the global reach of Omicron.
I completely failed to notice this, whoops. Do you have some more information on this?
Yea. Gamma was the dominant strain in Brazill, Luxembourg, Chile, Argentina, and a few other places in early-to-mid 2021, but never become the dominant strain in the US. Similarly for Lambda in Peru, Mu in Colombia, 20B/S:732A in Mexico, 20A/S:439K in Slovenia, 20E in Lithuania, and a handful of other strains in some other countries. This is all from Covariants.org. Many of these countries do roughly as much sequencing as SA does, so it seems like an appropriate reference class for thinking about Omicron.
What fraction of these fizzled out because they were displaced by a fitter variant vs just not spreading further? That seems very important for figuring out how much to freak out
To be clear, I’m not proposing a bet that no newly emerging variants are going to be consequential. I’m interesting in making a much narrower claim about the global reach of Omicron.