COVID variants are getting more airborne, making them more contagious https://www.cbsnews.com/news/covid-variants-more-airborne-more-contagious/ A new study finds COVID-19 variants are getting more airborne than their predecessors, CBS Baltimore reports. "The virus is evolving to get better at airborne spread; it's getting out into the air better," Dr. Donald Milton, one of the researchers who conducted the study at the University of Maryland's School of Public Health, told the station. The researchers tested 49 infected people and found that variants are spreading better. "People sit with a cone in front of their face that is collecting all of the air coming from around their head," Dr. Milton explained. The cone, called the Gesundheit TWO, measures how much virus is in their breath. The test was conducted with people's masks on and with their masks off. And the results show that those with a variant were breathing out more virus. "Eighteen times more in the air," Milton pointed out. The study involved the Alpha variant, which was the dominant one when the research was conducted. Alpha was more contagious than the original form of COVID-19 but less contagious than the Delta variant that's so common today. Anne Simon was among those tested and said she was shocked at how much COVID was coming out of her. She said she caught COVID while outside at her farm sitting next to someone who was infected. "We eat outside occasionally together and little did we know one Sunday afternoon, one of us had COVID," she said. Simon was tested for the study within days of exhibiting symptoms. "Without a mask, just breathing normally, talking softly, they were able to measure a substantial amount of COVID on droplets," said Simon. He added that, as the virus gets better at getting into the air, the public needs to be better about keeping it out of the air. Though the study revealed that masks cut down the spread of the virus by half, with variants becoming more airborne, masks should be worn more tightly around the face, Milton said. Toward that end, N-95 masks are preferred because surgical masks have room around your face for the virus to get in and out, Milton noted. He also recommends opening windows in the house to allow for more ventilation and perhaps purchasing air purifiers.
Meet the Delta Plus variant. Now making itself at home among the unvaccinated in the U.K. What you need to know about the Delta Plus COVID variant and the danger it poses https://fortune.com/2021/10/18/delta-plus-covid-variant-uk-danger-gottlieb/ Dr Hilary warns new Covid variant could send UK 'back to square one' amid 45,000 new cases https://www.express.co.uk/showbiz/t...oronavirus-cases-update-Susanna-Reid-video-vn Scientists uncover why the Delta Plus variant ‘induces more damage’ as Covid cases surge THE UK has recorded its highest daily jumps in COVID-19 cases since mid-July, prompting calls to probe the Delta Plus variant. Officials have voiced concerns that the mutated strain, which was first identified in the UK, may fan the flames of ongoing coronavirus transmission. https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/health/1507806/coronavirus-delta-plus-variant
More of the new subtype variant of Delta in the U.K. Remember to thank the unvaccinated for this. Scientists are closely tracking a new variant spreading in the UK that could be 10% more infectious than Delta https://www.businessinsider.com/delta-variant-covid-ay42-under-investigation-uk-2021-10 Scientists are closely tracking a new coronavirus variant called AY.4.2, a subtype of Delta. Early data suggested it could be 10% more infectious than Delta, one expert said. Cases are low outside the UK. Former FDA chief Dr. Scott Gottlieb called for "urgent" research on the variant. Scientists worldwide are closely tracking a descendent of the highly infectious Delta variantt hat is spreading in the UK. England's public-health authority said in a report on Friday that it was monitoring a subtype of the Delta variant called AY.4.2, which had infected more and more people recently. Francois Balloux, director at the University College London Genetics Institute, said on Twitter on Saturday that data about AY.4.2 suggested it could be 10% more transmissible than the most common Delta variant in the UK, called AY.4. "As such, it feels worthwhile keeping an eye on it," he said. As of September 27, 6% of UK sequenced tests were AY4.2, Public Health England (PHE) said in its report on Friday, adding that estimates could be imprecise because it was difficult to sequence the variant's mutations. Dr. Scott Gottlieb, the former Food and Drug Administration commissioner, said that the new variant wasn't an "immediate cause for concern," but called for "urgent research" to work out if it was more infectious or able to avoid the body's immune response. "We should work to more quickly characterize these and other new variants. We have the tools," he said on Twitter on Sunday, adding that a coordinated, global response was required. Dr Jeffrey Barrett, medical genomics group leader at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, said on Twitter on Tuesday that AY.4.2 was the only Delta descendant that was steadily increasing, suggesting a "consistent advantage" over Delta. Barrett cautioned that AY.4.2 was replacing Delta at a much slower rate than Delta had replaced the formerly-dominant Alpha variant. The Delta variant is estimated to be about 60% more infectious than Alpha. The same pattern for AY.4.2 hasn't yet been seen in other countries. Balloux said in a statement on Tuesday that the variant was "rare" outside of the UK, with only three cases detected in the US so far. "In Denmark, the other country that besides the UK has excellent genomic surveillance in place, it reached a 2% frequency but has gone down since," he said. New mutations The virus that causes COVID-19 gets about two new mutations per month, and there are now 56 Delta descendants, according to Scipps University's Outbreak.info, which includes data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Before AY.4.2, PHE had tended to group Delta and its descendants together. AY.4.2 has two new mutations in the part of the virus that attaches to human cells, which is called the spike protein. It's not yet clear how these mutations will affect the virus' behavior. Balloux said neither of these mutations had been found in other variants of concern.
CDC ‘very carefully’ monitoring ‘Delta plus’ COVID-19 variant, Walensky says https://nypost.com/2021/10/24/cdc-carefully-monitoring-delta-plus-covid-19-variant/
COVID Vaccine Makers Prepare for a Variant Worse than Delta Companies are updating vaccines and testing them on people to prepare for whatever comes next in the pandemic https://www.scientificamerican.com/...akers-prepare-for-a-variant-worse-than-delta/
Here’s all we know about the COVID-19 Delta sub-variant AY.4.2 https://www.zmescience.com/science/heres-all-we-know-about-the-covid-19-delta-sub-variant-ay-4-2/
The real risk in the U.S. for a "bad Covid winter" is a variant which is more infectious and more "vaccine evasive" than Delta. If the U.S. can avoid a new bad variant then as vaccination levels increase we are more likely to have a winter where Covid starts to become a endemic rather than a pandemic. The current vaccinated breakthrough rate is around 0.5% in areas with high prevalence of Covid (which is pretty much every county in the U.S. currently). The expected Covid vaccinated breakthrough rate was 0.5% to 3% -- so we are currently pretty much at the lower end of the range which is very good. However a new variant which is more resistive to being blocked by vaccination could change the trajectory for a "mild" Covid winter in the U.S. We are seeing multiple new variants showing up (thanks to the unvaccinated) which can be a trigger for a bad winter -- the one of most concern is AY.4.2. A potentially faster-spreading Delta variant, AY.4.2, has been spotted in 8 states https://www.cbsnews.com/news/covid-delta-plus-variant-ay-4-2-states/ A potentially faster-spreading "sub-lineage" of the coronavirus Delta variant named AY.4.2 has been spotted by labs in at least 8 states, and health authorities in the United Kingdom say they are investigating a growing share of cases from this strain of the virus. Labs in California, Florida, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nevada, North Carolina, Rhode Island and Washington state, plus the District of Columbia, have so far spotted at least one case of AY.4.2. While it may spread somewhat faster, health authorities have not found evidence of more severe illness caused by the variant, and they say current vaccines remain effective against it. The sub-lineage has remained a small fraction of circulating cases in the U.S. for several weeks, but American health officials say they are already ramping up efforts to study the new Delta variant descendant. "We have teams that are constantly reviewing the genetic sequence data and looking for blips, an increase in a certain proportion or just something that's completely new," says Dr. Summer Galloway, executive secretary of the U.S. government's SARS-CoV-2 Interagency Group. Galloway, who also serves as policy lead on the CDC's laboratory and testing task force, said U.S. labs began preparing last month to prioritize tests to assess whether AY.4.2 can evade antibodies from vaccinated Americans, or from currently authorized monoclonal antibody treatments for the virus. That process can take up to four weeks, Galloway said, across several laboratories that will run tests with harmless "pseudoviruses" designed to impersonate the variant's characteristic mutations. Scientists have already turned up worrying combinations of mutations in other sub-lineages of Delta called AY.1 and AY.2, which like AY.4.2 have also sometimes been interchangeably called "Delta plus" variants. Last month, the Biden administration temporarily halted distribution of a monoclonal antibody treatment in Hawaii after estimated cases of AY.1 climbed up to 7.7% in the state. The Food and Drug Administration said lab experiments with AY.1 suggested it was "unlikely" the drug would be effective against the variant. The state has since resumed use of the antibody treatment, after AY.1 dropped below 5% in Hawaii. Nationwide, AY.1 has hovered around 0.1% of cases. "Right now, I think there's not a lot that we know. But in terms of the risk that it poses to public health, the prevalence is very low in the U.S. and we don't really anticipate that the substitutions [of AY.4.2] are going to have a significant impact on either the effectiveness of our vaccines or its susceptibility to monoclonal antibody treatments," said Galloway. In the U.K., AY.4.2 has climbed to more than 11% of cases of the Delta variant. Health officials there say the variant does not appear to have led to a "significant reduction" in vaccine effectiveness or an uptick in hospitalizations, but it could be spreading faster because of "slightly increased biological transmissibility." "Estimated growth rates remain slightly higher for AY.4.2 than for Delta, and the household secondary attack rate is higher for AY.4.2 cases than for other Delta cases," said a report published Friday by the U.K. Health Security Agency. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that AY.4.2 has made up less than 0.05% of circulating cases in the U.S. for several weeks, according to an agency spokesperson. Grouped together, CDC estimates that the Delta variant and its sub-lineages has been virtually 100% of cases in the U.S. for months. "Even based on the data in the U.K., if you look at the transmission advantage, it looks smaller. It's not like Delta, which as soon as they came in, it was almost a 50[%] to 60% advantage over all previous lineages," says Dr. Karthik Gangavarapu, a postdoctoral researcher at UCLA's Suchard group. Gangavarapu was part of the team to lead Scripps Research's variant tracking effort at Outbreak.info, which has tracked variants like AY.4.2 as they have emerged in an international database of "sequenced" viruses maintained by a group called the GISAID Initiative. "It could have a slight transmission advantage, but it could also have other factors that are important. For example, how is the population immunity in a given location? What is the vaccination rate? Those may have some sort of impact on how the variant is spreading," said Gangavarapu. The largest share of circulating virus in the U.S. remains closely related to the original Delta variant, among samples reported to GISAID. Scientists have speculated that the next major variant of concern could emerge as a mutation from the Delta variant, though Gangavarapu cautioned that highly-contagious strains have arisen largely independently from one another. Delta variant sub-lineages like AY.25, AY.3, and AY.44 also currently make up large U.S. proportions of cases, though not necessarily because they have an advantage over their siblings. Outbreak.info had previously counted AY.4.2 sightings in at least 35 states. However, Gangavarapu said a bug in the "Pangolin" system used to generate reports of variants had resulted in some false positives for the sub-lineage showing up in some tallies. New sub-lineages are frequently re-categorized by scientists to "help researchers track the virus" clustered in certain regions, even when they sport mutations that end up having no meaningful impact on the public health risk of the variant. "Probably over the next month or so we will get more data to actually see if there is the same sort of increase in prevalence that we see in the U.K. in the U.S. as of now," says Gangavarapu.