Comments from an anonymous source (who I vouch for as a careful thinker) on Dec. 22 and 24:
Hmmm, if Trevor [Bedford] is taking this seriously then I’m updating towards this one maybe mattering
The April mutation scare I found totally unconvincing
I’m still not totally convinced fwiw
[...] There’s some evidence [the new strain] increases viral load, so same vectors, just more likely to get a big enough dose
[...] The last bit hubbub about new strains turned out to be a nothing burger. And unlike Zvi I think super spreader dynamics are totally fine to explain things
If you look across the whole history of each country over time, there are tons of random unexplained massive rise in cases
Is every one of those a new mutation? Absolutely not
[...] How many random unexplained huge rises have we seen across how many countries?
Most countries have had 1-3 big waves, and they’re only sometimes concurrent with each other, across dozens of major tracked countries
So at least several dozen quasi-independent observations[...] even more so if we use sub-regions within countries
Comments from an anonymous source (who I vouch for as a careful thinker) on Dec. 22 and 24:
More thoughts from Trevor Bedford. He is more convinced that it is more transmissible.