rotting sea cow

I've read the same. The comparatively high prevalence of HIV in some African countries with those individuals being treated with antiviral cocktails make them dangerous factories of variants. In fact, there is the speculation that patient zero was an HIV positive person.

Regarding the new variant. I think we must assume it's already everywhere and those travel bans come - as usual - too late. The woman who traveled from Egypt to Belgium reportedly tested positive 11 days after arrival. Although an unusual long incubation time cannot be ruled out, most likely she caught it there, in Belgium, not in Egypt. Yesterday two planes were stopped in Netherlands with about 600 people of which 60 have tested positive, although no word yet about what variant, you can extrapolate that back to the previous days and weeks and to different countries. S. Africa simply announced the discovery because they have a decent testing and sequencing capability, but we must assume that silent spread has been going on for weeks if not months. We need then urgently to learn about its infectiousness compared with Delta, its capability for immune evasion and whether pathology and symptoms have changed.

Ok. News have broken that this new variant has been detected in Belgium from a woman traveling from Egypt. This seems to be very bad news, but there is a silver lining. It means that the variant is likely all across Africa and probably elsewhere and this hasn't led to a huge increase of cases or deaths that we know of. That might indicate that might be less aggressive. Of course, one shouldn't rely on that and to not take precautions until we can learn more about it.

It doesn't seem that "Nu" is outcompeting Delta as there is no much Delta to compete with. S. Africa is interesting, waves by different variants at a frequency of 1/6months.

Mutant is already in Israel https://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-detects-first-case-of-new-highly-mutated-covid-19-strain/ I was wondering why we haven't heard of new variants. At this time of the past year, they started to sprout like mushrooms and now there was nothing, except those Delta children and here we go again.

to be honest. The rumor comes from a nice Armenian lady I know, well immersed in Eastern European immigrant subculture. She was right when she said that Russian troops where in Armenia several days before the news broke. Things there are hot as well and Russia has been threatening Azerbaijan with invasion if they don't stop the BS. Now, she is a bit on the conspiracy theory side and she claims she had COVID in Summer 2019 when visiting her family. Antibodies are positive, she tells me, but that doesn't tell much at this stage.

BTW, there might be other reasons why it's replacing Delta, not only out-competing them. As I posted above, Delta seems to be destroying itself in Japan leading to nearly extinction. It might be happening elsewhere, specially if there is a large number of immune individuals. At that point immune escape is more beneficial than high infectiousness.

Eric Feigl-Ding is a doomer and has been proven wrong with many of his scary predictions. Nonetheless, he has been right on few things and he was one of the first to really sound the alarm regarding SARS-CoV-2. You are right to a certain extend however I think it's correct to take measures NOW before it became a problem. Governments waited far too long to take measures against vanilla SARS-CoV-2 even as the data that was coming from China indicated that things were very bad. They did the same mistake with Alpha, when they suspended flight from the UK was way too late and the same with Beta, Gamma and ultimately Delta. Current standard travel controls have been useless in containing the variants, but even stricter ones like those in New Zealand have ultimately failed. I've read that Africa is particularly prone to create nasty variants due to poverty and crowding as well as frequent contact with multiple animals. Another problem is the high prevalence of HIV, meaning immunocompromised individuals on antiviral therapies, breeding ground for mutations. In fact, once I saw a speculation that COVID patient zero might have been an HIV positive person. Well, that is something. One thing that worries me is that eventually a variant might be able to use another receptor other than ACE2 for cell entry, affecting pathology. The question will be, if it's deadlier we are screwed, but if it's milder, what should we do? Should we let it spread? At some point this bloody virus has to attenuate itself, it happened with OC43, the most probable causative agent of the Russian flu pandemic. Now it's cold.

Nature has an short article https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-03552-w It has been detected in Honk-Kong already. Chances are it's spreading elsewhere too. S. Africa is starting its bi-annual surge, like a clock. Edit: There are claims that Delta is mutating itself into extinction in Japan. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2021/11/18/national/delta-variant-self-destruction-theory/ It would be cool that something like that happens elsewhere. Japan is really a weird case in the pandemic.

I've been told today that Russia is evacuating as many civilians as possible from the Donbas area and Ukraine and US are pissed about it. Shit may hit the fan soon there.

I completely agree with this statement. Vaccines are not the silver bullet that we thought before. Countries with higher vaccination rates than Germany (like Portugal, Denmark, Island) are also seeing their case load rises and the question is how bad will it be for them in a few weeks. At least some countries like Portugal are rolling back some measures before things get really bad. The question is then, will that only delay the wave or fully prevent it. Maybe it will just give them time to boost part of the population to not overload the hospitals. There is a lot of what I call western exceptionalism in this sort of thinking. The same thinking that doomed countries in Feb-March 2020. We saw what happened in India and we just shifted the blame on Modi and the lack of vaccines. We saw the wave in south US states and the blame was put on antivaxxers and republicans We saw the big summer wave and the persistent high infection rate in the UK but the blame was on Brexit Boris. We saw the disaster in Russia, Romania and other eastern European countries and the blame was on their pitiful vaccination rates. Now countries with pretty decent vaccination rates are being hammered. Where are we going to put the blame? With those high vaccination, shouldn't have we expected a far more milder wave?

I'm unsure whether there will be a real battle at Winterfell. Instead we may expect a quick takeover. I think there is already chaos within the walls.

A very long and detailed article regarding ivermectin https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ivermectin-much-more-than-you-wanted I didn't read it fully, but the takeaway is, it most likely does nothing against COVID infection BUT as it turns out, worm infections are likely a cofounder, because they decrease survival rates of COVID patients and some drugs to treat severe COVID can make those infections worse, which is likely the effect that the few serious studies are seeing. Overall, interesting

Or the one to kill Bronn

He took it in his hands before, during the bedding.