I don’t think it’s correct to say that it remains stable at 0.5-1% of samples in Denmark. There were 13 samples of the new variant last week, vs. only 3 two weeks ago, if I understood the data correctly. If it went from 0.5% to 1% in a week then you should be alarmed. (Although 3 and 13 are both small enough that it’s hard to compute a growth rate, but it certainly seems consistent with the UK data to me.)
I think better evidence against non-infectiousness would be Italy and Israel, where the variant seems to be dominant but there isn’t runaway growth. But: - Italy was on a downtick and then imposed a stronger lockdown, yet the downtick switched to being flat. So R does seem to have increased in Italy. - Israel is vaccinating everyone fairly quickly right now.
At the time of writing the weekly percentages were 0.3%, 0%, 0.2%, 0.5%, 0.9% which I did not perceive as weekly doubling. But I was likely fooled by the noise of the first weeks where numbers were too low to be meaningful. Yesterday latest weekly numbers came out and last week the percentage was 2.3%. So numbers are clearly worrying and in line with Zvi’s post.
Do you have a source for B.1.1.7 being dominant in Italy/Israel?
Assuming it’s already dominant there, that strongly suggests that it’s infectious enough to have rapidly outcompeted other strains, but that Italy/Israel were able to push down the higher R through some combination of behavioral change and vaccination.
(Note: I can’t find any sources saying B.1.1.7 is dominant in Italy or Israel, and I’d be surprised if that were already the case.)
I might be missing something, but where in this link do you see the dominance?
If it is the large proportion of sequencing showing B.1.1.7 (18/33 for Italy and 4⁄13 for Israel), isn’t that due to increased surveillance, like testing positive people coming from the UK?
Caveat: Most locations outside the original focus have not reported sustained transmission and many cases have known travel links to the focal location. Increasing numbers of international cases is currently likely due to increased surveillance and vigilance.
You may well be right. I guess we don’t really know what the sampling bias is (it would have to be pretty strongly skewed towards incoming UK cases though to get to a majority, since the UK itself was near 50%).
I don’t think it’s correct to say that it remains stable at 0.5-1% of samples in Denmark. There were 13 samples of the new variant last week, vs. only 3 two weeks ago, if I understood the data correctly. If it went from 0.5% to 1% in a week then you should be alarmed. (Although 3 and 13 are both small enough that it’s hard to compute a growth rate, but it certainly seems consistent with the UK data to me.)
I think better evidence against non-infectiousness would be Italy and Israel, where the variant seems to be dominant but there isn’t runaway growth. But:
- Italy was on a downtick and then imposed a stronger lockdown, yet the downtick switched to being flat. So R does seem to have increased in Italy.
- Israel is vaccinating everyone fairly quickly right now.
At the time of writing the weekly percentages were 0.3%, 0%, 0.2%, 0.5%, 0.9% which I did not perceive as weekly doubling. But I was likely fooled by the noise of the first weeks where numbers were too low to be meaningful. Yesterday latest weekly numbers came out and last week the percentage was 2.3%. So numbers are clearly worrying and in line with Zvi’s post.
Do you have a source for B.1.1.7 being dominant in Italy/Israel?
Assuming it’s already dominant there, that strongly suggests that it’s infectious enough to have rapidly outcompeted other strains, but that Italy/Israel were able to push down the higher R through some combination of behavioral change and vaccination.
(Note: I can’t find any sources saying B.1.1.7 is dominant in Italy or Israel, and I’d be surprised if that were already the case.)
See here: https://cov-lineages.org/global_report.html
I might be missing something, but where in this link do you see the dominance? If it is the large proportion of sequencing showing B.1.1.7 (18/33 for Italy and 4⁄13 for Israel), isn’t that due to increased surveillance, like testing positive people coming from the UK?
You may well be right. I guess we don’t really know what the sampling bias is (it would have to be pretty strongly skewed towards incoming UK cases though to get to a majority, since the UK itself was near 50%).