Many countries have been very quick to close their borders to stop the spread of the new covid strain but are they just jumping on the bandwagon?
I know there has been some discussion on other threads about the 70% increase in infectiousness and some academics in other countries have questioned the figures.
The new strain has been found as far away as Australia so if it is genuinely super easy to spread surely all the European countries who have blocked travel from the UK should also close all inward travel. Seems like double standards and an easy way to distract attention in various countries by saying "look, the UK is the sick man of Europe".
Given that we're internally asking people not to travel out of the Tier 4 areas and are concerned enough about it for Boris to actually step up and make a contentious decision about Xmas, I'm not surprised other countries are also responding. Though it seems that after an initial cautionary approach, some of the restrictions are going to be eased. In the long run, I suspect most countries will realise this variant arrived with them some time ago and our issues with it will end up being unexceptional.
I've read your post but feel I have to ask this: what's your point? It seems as though you're grumbling about the behaviour of the neighbours without addressing what's going on at home.
So, what are you trying to say?
T.
I have it in mind that some countries banned all travel from Denmark when they had the mutation in their minks. It makes sense, ban travel first to buy time and assess what the risk actually is. If only we could have learnt that lesson a long time ago we would be in a different situation now!
I’m sure it’s all over the world by now, but the longer places with low prevalence keep more cases out, the longer they have before the situation become critical for them. Stall for 2-3 weeks and see what’s learned by the UK.
If I was leadership in another country I’d be quarantine and contact tracing all UK arrivals from the last 3-4 weeks.
Its not intuitive but hard borders help even when prevalence is similar on both sides. When it’s asymmetric, it’s obviously going to help - even if that’s just stalling for time.
London appears to be out of time. Cases doubling in about 5 days.
> Cases doubling in about 5 days.
Same with me in Reading. 60+ age group figures are static. <60 looks exponential (by eye).
It will be really interesting to see where this crops up around the world. In South Africa a similar mutation with likely the same biological advantages in infectivity has arisen, but phylogenetic analysis has demonstrated that this represents a new set of mutations.
Young children are currently protected by the reduced expression of the binding site for the virus. This mutation could certainly change that advantage. Something that may change our attitude to schools and education.
I would not call any country unfair at this point for taking stock, but as has been pointed out in the virology circles on twitter the UK does do this form of viral identification and analysis very well.
It is good to know we are good at something at the moment, although I do not expect the government to suddenly cover themselves in glory.
> Its not intuitive but hard borders help even when prevalence is similar on both sides.
Could you expand on this please? I always assumed that travel restrictions between areas of similar prevalance were somewhat irrational. I can think of various reasons to do it anyway, mostly somewhat propaganda-y, but I wouldn't have thought directly reducing spread would be one. What's your logic? (Asked in the sense that I think it's probably sound and I'm intrigued to see what I'm missing, rather than doubting you.)
It all depends on how well the UK government communicated the data with the other countries before making public announcements.
As I see it, it's a network effect - the people you could transmit the virus to are generally the same day after day. The links between people that it flows along are fixed, and they constrain the spread.
The more you travel, the more new links you put in the diagram, bridging previously well separated clusters of people and their links.
Whilst the virus is everywhere, most of the people you meet won't have it and are susceptible to it. Chucking a load of different people temporality in to the mix widens the attack surface for transmitting and receiving the virus.
Balkanizing people in to smaller groups (population size / number of cases) can dramatically slow transmission. Hard borders - internal and external are key to this. RichardJ (I think) posted a good paper modelling this many months ago.
Then there's the practicalities like long distance travel usually involving high risk places like service stations, confined tin cans on wheels or wings, hotels and so on.
Maybe if the world had locked down travel in the first place we wouldn't all be in this mess.
That all makes sense. It strikes me that in theory most of those effects are really only proxies for the border aspect. In principle, if house A only mixes with house B, it doesn't make much difference whether the houses are either side of an arbitrary border or not. But in practice, I can see that with real human behaviour there could still be substantial impacts.
Congratulations - your thread has attracted the mysterious "universal disliker". They dislike each and every post. I haven't seen them in months.
It depends on why you're travelling across a border - is it a daily commute to see the same people as usual, or is it a leisure trip that's going to involve different people? The later represents a very different risk to the former.
From my skim reading of the news, some of the border closures between EU states are allowing people to do their usual cross-border work commute, for example.
> It depends on why you're travelling across a border - is it a daily commute to see the same people as usual, or is it a leisure trip that's going to involve different people? The later represents a very different risk to the former.
That's what I meant in my last post really, but didn't explain very clearly. For areas of similar prevalence, imposing a border is in some ways a proxy means of cutting down on other types of behaviour rather than inherently beneficial in principle. Or rather, there are inherent benefits but the additional proxy benefits might be larger. And then, of course, we don't have uniform prevalence anyway, let alone uniform distribution of different strains.
In a world with entirely even distribution of the virus, if you had perfectly behaved citizens and could apply a rule like "you're allowed x number of leisure trips per month, totalling y contacts with other people at z closeness", I don't imagine it would make much difference whether you erected any boundaries within that area. Most of the differences I can see arrive in the real world where imposing hard borders is easier to do than precisely defining behaviour limits and getting people to stick with them. Plus the real-world difficulties, as you say, of actually travelling without increasing exposure.
Contact tracing just isn't happening is it?
We contact trace anyone who has been with someone for 15 minutes of more, at a distance of 6ft or less. That's very few people. Even in our school all desks are 6 feet away so we've had no 'close contacts' from two school cases. But both kids never found out how they got it. Testing is easy here so loads get tested, many parents are testetd weekly and we dont jknow how they got ill.
TBH I just don't see why people are traveling right now. Just stay local, exercise local, use a car sensibly and just be patient for 2-3-4 months until we've vaccinated more and its better outside.
> London appears to be out of time. Cases doubling in about 5 days.
Having just been food shopping in a tier 4 area I expect it to get even worse.
Number of people having a family night out and arguing loudly over what to buy plus kids running about screaming was quite impressive. Whilst they did have staff counting people in and out I think it would have been far better if they had told the family groups to have one parent wait with the kids outside.
>Contact tracing just isn't happening is it?
At >30,000 cases per day there'd be hundreds of thousands of contacts here, so completely impossible (I'll ignore the fact that the English system couldn't even cope with a few hundred)
The criteria are the same though >15mins at <2m
Also there isn't a great deal of trust in the UK to be doing the right thing
> So, what are you trying to say?
I'm saying this variant is likely already present in most of the countries banning access from the UK. Arrivals from the UK are required to quarantine in these countries regardless so an immediate outright ban is going to have limited effect.
Infection rates in many countries are at, or close to, their highest since the start of the pandemic. I'm suggesting that it's a convenient distraction technique by said countries rather than a strictly necessary measure.
> I suspect most countries will realise this variant arrived with them some time ago and our issues with it will end up being unexceptional.
This was my train of thought, hence my question about other countries reaction.
Most or all of the countries which have banned arrivals from the UK require quarantine or a negative test (I haven't checked the latest FO advice). I'm not sure what else can be achieved by a blanket ban.
Quarantine is far from perfect even in countries with central facilities rather than honour systems.
A negative test is nowhere near a 100% guarantee that someone isn’t infectious, let alone that they aren’t incubating the virus and going to go on to become infectious.
I’m horrified by the path cases are taking in London right now. I’m not surprised people slammed the borders down.
> Infection rates in many countries are at, or close to, their highest since the start of the pandemic. I'm suggesting that it's a convenient distraction technique by said countries rather than a strictly necessary measure.
Which means they have no slack in their systems for a new, more transmissible strain to take hold.
> It all depends on how well the UK government communicated the data with the other countries before making public announcements.
It's clear that this government has a woeful lack of scientifically minded individuals and would rather rely on what they hope people want to hear. The 70% increase in infectiousness is obviously a headline grabbing figure, if due diligence on it's validity hadn't been done then that's very serious.
Thanks. That wasn't the aim, I asked a genuine question but I can only assume some have taken it the wrong way.
> . I'm not sure if you ever saw this, but there were plenty of borders shut earlier. Just not the UK's.
Perhaps a lack of context in how it's been reported in the UK makes it look worse than it is.
> Also there isn't a great deal of trust in the UK to be doing the right thing
Understandable. To misquote many recent press releases, I don't have an abundance of confidence in the government.
Makes perfect sense to close borders with the epicentre. How much there is already out there is another question.
You are right that most require self isolation, which people might or might not stick to... Very few require quarantine, as in you get put in a government run facility for two weeks. NZ, Oz, may be some Far Eastern countries.
Compare the US sequence data with that from the UK (40 versus 3700 full genome sequences)
https://twitter.com/EricTopol/status/1341535672297955330?s=20
I have wondered if France's closure of entry from the UK was to indicate what things might be like if there is a no deal Brexit.
More seriously, it is understandable as there has been a spike in cases.
We do not yet know if the new strain is more transmissible; there have been questions in Germany and from the WHO that we don't know this.
Whether it is more transmissible or not, it can't transmit if people do not meet and we have seen that some people are not following the rules.
Dave
> We do not yet know if the new strain is more transmissible; there have been questions in Germany and from the WHO that we don't know this.
I think that's basically beyond reasonable doubt now.
If the new strain isn't more transmissible, something else is responsible for lockdown failing two weeks in, in the same area as the new strain first emerged, and then for this failure of lockdown propagating outwards from that shared epicentre over time - just as the new strain starts getting detected in other areas.
We may not have lab grade proof, but with areas around the shared epicentre of both events (lockdown failure and new strain) hitting 5-day doubling times for cases we also can't afford to wait for lab grade proof. Because if the balance of probabilities is right, we'll be hitting infection rates in excess of 1 million a day and deaths of over 7,000 a day locked in by the time that kind of lab grade proof is here.
The only responsible cause of action is to assume it is more transmissible and to do everything possible to reign in the new exponential growth - which is happening at rates only previously seen before the first lockdown.
How would you feel if they were coming to your house?
> It's clear that this government has a woeful lack of scientifically minded individuals and would rather rely on what they hope people want to hear. The 70% increase in infectiousness is obviously a headline grabbing figure, if due diligence on it's validity hadn't been done then that's very serious.
Aren't you doing the same here? Suggesting that it's lack of diligence rather than a real increase, that's people want to hear?
> How would you feel if they were coming to your house?
I've not had any guests enter the house since March so that's a mute point with me.
I assume a large proportion of people flying the week before Christmas are going to see family. I'd say that is not terribly wise right now but it's up to individual countries to determine what local rules to follow.
> Aren't you doing the same here? Suggesting that it's lack of diligence rather than a real increase, that's people want to hear?
The 70% figure being quoted has been questioned. If uncertainty exists it would have been better to quote a range as they do with the R number. Misinformation has been rife during the pandemic, I don't think it is unreasonable to state upfront that some statistics come with a significant margin of error.
> Congratulations - your thread has attracted the mysterious "universal disliker". They dislike each and every post. I haven't seen them in months.
Dislikes are best treated as a badge of honour, especially if there's no accompanying reason, refutation or opinion. It weeds out the lazy cowards. The more dislikes I get, the better I feel.
> The 70% figure being quoted has been questioned. If uncertainty exists it would have been better to quote a range as they do with the R number. Misinformation has been rife during the pandemic, I don't think it is unreasonable to state upfront that some statistics come with a significant margin of error.
You don't think erring on the side of safety is reasonable? and questioned by who?
> I've not had any guests enter the house since March so that's a mute point with me.
Which was my point, so not moot at all really then, I think most right-minded people are doing the same.
> I assume a large proportion of people flying the week before Christmas are going to see family. I'd say that is not terribly wise right now but it's up to individual countries to determine what local rules to follow.
Which is why they're not being unfair, only trying to protect their citizens.
> other countries being unfair?
That's an appropriate question. For an eight year old.
For international relations during a pandemic it's barely relevant.
> Seems like double standards and an easy way to distract attention in various countries
In other news, dirty politics exists in other countries too and bear defecates in woods.
> unfair
It's got nothing to do with fairness and everything to do with nobody trusting us to do the right thing. Our prime minister is a lazy, inadequate clown and our ineffectual government has allowed the domestic situation to get out of control. The new variant is almost certainly nationwide and worldwide: the countries that have enacted travel restrictions are just trying to buy themselves some time. I don't blame them at all.
> You don't think erring on the side of safety is reasonable? and questioned by who?
This BBC article says there is no clear evidence, yet, of the variant spreading quicker than other strains.
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-55312505
Granted it's a week old but it does give possible other reasons.
> This BBC article says there is no clear evidence, yet, of the variant spreading quicker than other strains
What they actually say is: "There is no clear-cut evidence the new variant of coronavirus - which has been detected in south-east England - is able to transmit more easily, cause more serious symptoms or render the vaccine useless". None of these address your claim of it spreading no quicker than other strains - there is direct and clear evidence from the lighthouse labs that this strain is out-spreading others, so you are categorically wrong with this interpretation of the article.
> Granted it's a week old but it does give possible other reasons.
A week is a very long time when cases are doubling every 5 days in some places.
> That's an appropriate question. For an eight year old.
I've not been rude to you. I've asked for people's take on my opinion, many have disagreed with me but have kept it civil.
> I've not been rude to you. I've asked for people's take on my opinion, many have disagreed with me but have kept it civil.
Conversation can sometimes be blunt and describing things as fair or unfair can provoke a reaction; like a lot of things in life, international geopolitics has little to do with what's appropriate, just, balanced and reasonable.
Don't be put off, and thank you for elucidating your questions more transparently earlier on.
T.
The whole idea that it's "unfair" or "revenge" is ridiculous!
Ask yourself what you'd like our government to do if it had been the French president announcing that there was a variant virus circulating out of control there, with the real potential to make things very much worse and overwhelm the health service, so they were locking down hard to control it.
Of course closing the border makes sense, until the situation can be properly assessed and the necessary security put in place.
The UK have reportedly just shut the door to South Africa due to another new variant coming from them.
EDIT: Ok, maybe not shut the door but new travel restrictions.
> The UK have reportedly just shut the door to South Africa due to another new variant coming from them.
> EDIT: Ok, maybe not shut the door but new travel restrictions.
You don't get emergency prophylactic measures, do you?
Or are you taking the really damaging claim by the Sun that the French are simply trying to send a warning over what a Hard Brexit will be like?
> You don't get emergency prophylactic measures, do you?
As someone else has pointed out, banning all flights would have worked 9 months ago. Such measures now are going to be less effective. We have differing opinions, that's all.
I made a few comments above about the likely prevalence that already exists in most of these countries, it just hasn't been identified.
> Or are you taking the really damaging claim by the Sun that the French are simply trying to send a warning over what a Hard Brexit will be like?
I never read the Sun, it's a load of rubbish.
It's almost certainly everywhere but if we learned anything from wave one it's to stop importing problems while you figure out what you're facing. Entirely reasonable of other countries to take some time to turn 'almost certainly' into 'certainly'. Of course lifting restrictions will be tricky and slow, it requires governments admit the failure of a previous policy and or the UK gives something, screening at exit ports in this case.
Jk
I’ve heard it said that the UK might be being ‘punished’ for having better scientists who spotted it before everyone else. I haven’t got a clue whether our scientists are better, but I wished our gov’t had shut our borders way back and re-opened with enforced quarantine systems for people arriving.
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