New Coronavirus News from 14 Jul 2022

Why Are People Calling COVID-19 Variant BA.2.75 'Centaurus'? [Snopes.com, 14 July 2022]

by Dan Evon

If enough people use a name to refer to something, who's to say that isn't what it's called?
On July 12, 2022, Ed Yong, a science writer for The Atlantic, posted a set of images that supposedly showed how a random Twitter user willed into existence a nickname for a new COVID-19 variant, BA.2.75: “Centaurus.”

Both of the screenshots in the above-displayed tweet were real. On July 1, Twitter user @xabitron1 truly posted a message saying the new strain should be called “Centaurus,” just like the star constellation. More than a week later, several news outlets published articles calling the new COVID-19 variant, which was a mutation of the omicron strain, by the “Centaurus” nickname.

So how did this happen?
While the Twitter user’s post may feel like an eerie prediction to some (in part because the internet is full of such bogus claims), that wasn’t the case. Rather, people realized the new strain needed a name that was easier to remember, or say, than “BA.2.75,” and so they created one.

After Yong’s tweet went viral, @xabitron1 explained in a tweet thread, “People will understand much better nicknames than letters and numbers, their perception of the different sub variants is a mess.”

Language Evolves
Linguists often refer to language as a “living” concept. Language is constantly evolving and, every year, new words get added to the dictionary. Merriam-Webster explained that it chooses new words largely based on actual usage. In other words, when a new word becomes used often, it may warrant its own entry in the dictionary. Merriam-Webster said in a statement:
Just as the language never stops evolving, the dictionary never stops expanding. New terms and new uses for existing terms are the constant in a living language, and our latest list brings together both new and likely familiar words that have shown extensive and established use.

A similar concept was at play when, in July 2022, COVID-19 variant BA.2.75 became unofficially known as “Centaurus.” After @xabitron1 presented the nickname, other Twitter users picked up on it and started using it, too. News outlets eventually followed suit and started using “Centaurus” in articles about the latest strain.

For example, the Australian Financial Review wrote on July 4:
Virologists are warning that a highly contagious new second-generation COVID-19 variant nicknamed “centaurus”, which has multiple immune-evading mutations and has grown rapidly in India, is likely to take over from omicron variants and drive a new wave of infection.

What is the World Health Organization saying?
The World Health Organization (WHO) is responsible for giving new COVID-19 variants their official names. To date, the WHO has largely used the Greek alphabet to help determine the labels. As far as the above-mentioned strain, the WHO has referred to it as a “new sub lineage of Omicron called BA.2.75,” as of this writing, and has not announced an official non-numerical name.

So, the WHO may never adopt the name “Centaurus,” even though journalists and social media users are using the title.

The strain was rapidly spreading in India and had arrived in the United Kingdom, as of this writing. The Guardian reported:
The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) designated it a “variant under monitoring” on 7 July, meaning there is some indication that it could be more transmissible or associated with more severe disease, but the evidence is weak or has not yet been assessed.

[…] In addition to its apparent rapid growth and wide geographical spread, virologists have been alerted by the sheer number of extra mutations BA.2.75 contains, relative to BA.2, from which it is likely to have evolved. ‘This could mean that it has had the chance to evolve an advantage over an already successful virus lineage,’ said Dr Stephen Griffin, a virologist at the University of Leeds.

‘It’s not so much the exact mutations, more the number/combination,’ said Dr Tom Peacock, a virologist at Imperial College London, who was the first to identify Omicron as a potential concern back in November 2021. ‘It’s hard to predict the effect of that many mutations appearing together – it gives the virus a bit of a ‘wildcard’ property where the sum of the parts could be worse than the parts individually.’
Some people have criticized the unofficial origins of the name “Centaurus,” arguing that people should leave the labeling up to the WHO to avoid potential confusion. For a historical disease-naming example, we previously explored the origins of the “Spanish Flu” and how that name originated as a bit of a misnomer.
Sources:
“A Twitter ‘Rando’ Named a New Coronavirus Variant Centaurus and It Stuck.” Washington Post. www.washingtonpost.com, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/14/centaurus-coronavirus-subvariant-world-health/. Accessed 14 July 2022.

Geddes, Linda. “‘Centaurus’: Virologists Express Concern at New Covid Subvariant.” The Guardian, 13 July 2022. The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jul/12/centaurus-virologists-express-concern-at-new-covid-subvariant-omicron.

“New ‘centaurus’ Covid-19 Variant Emerges.” NZ Herald, https://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/world-health-organisation-identifies-stealth-omicron-covid-strain-centaurus/DNZXPUCQJ4PM6DMOTWDHX5G3DA/. Accessed 14 July 2022.

“Omicron, Delta, Alpha, and More: What To Know About the Coronavirus Variants.” Yale Medicine, https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/covid-19-variants-of-concern-omicron. Accessed 14 July 2022.

Tapp, Tom. “New Mutant Covid Variant From India, BA.2.75, Detected In California & 6 Other States, Raising Concern About Fall 2022 Wave.” Deadline, 13 July 2022, https://deadline.com/2022/07/ba-two-75-new-covid-variant-india-1235063096/.
Twitter Nicknames BA.2.75, but WHO Says It’s Not Official.
https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/public-health/twitter-nicknames-ba-2-75-but-who-says-it-s-not-official.html. Accessed 14 July 2022.

“Virologists Predict New ‘Centaurus’ Variant Will Drive next Virus Wave.” Australian Financial Review, 4 July 2022, https://www.afr.com/policy/health-and-education/virologists-predict-new-centaurus-variant-will-drive-next-virus-wave-20220704-p5ayt6.

WHO Director-General’s Opening Remarks at the Member State Information Session on COVID-19 and Other Issues. https://www.who.int/director-general/speeches/detail/who-director-general-s-opening-remarks-at-the-member-state-information-session-on-covid-19-and-other-issues. Accessed 14 July 2022.

New Coronavirus News from 16 Jul 2022

Covid killed so many of us – now the UK government fears our tears and rage [The Guardian, 16 July 2022]

by Michael Rosen

With deaths from the virus passing 200,000, Britain is a country struggling to process the trauma of so much fear and loss

Covid changed my life, so anything I say about it is coloured by what has happened. To my mind, we are chewing over several levels of trauma at the same time: personal, social, national and possibly global. This can feel as if we have been bombarded.

Even though I have the date clear in my mind when I started getting ill, I don’t know which of the things I was doing in the days prior was “the moment”. I ask myself, did the virus get into my lungs at home? Or at the Emirates Stadium watching Arsenal? On a school visit, surrounded by teenagers asking for a selfie? Or in the BBC Today programme studio talking about why I thought an unpleasant attitude was emerging that suggested that if old people got Covid and died it mattered less than if young people got it?

These questions place the virus in the midst of our social life. We live and work in groups. It reminds me that the virus doesn’t “spread”. We spread it. We cough, sneeze and breathe on each other. Whatever we do about the viruses that may harm us will affect and change our social existence. When millions of us have been harmed or killed, we feel it as a social trauma in ways that I don’t think we’ve thought through yet.

There were moments when we turned on each other, sneering and insulting each other for wearing or not wearing masks, for caring or not caring whether 80-year-olds died, for believing or not believing that long Covid existed. As I came out of my 48 days in intensive care, 40 of which were in an induced coma, I harked back to that conversation I had had in the Today studio and wondered whether in March 2020, when I got ill, the government really did want to protect me.

I started researching the timeline: what had the people in power said just at the moment I got ill? On 3 February 2020, Boris Johnson gave a speech in Greenwich, south London, where he said: “We are starting to hear some bizarre autarkic rhetoric, when barriers are going up, and when there is a risk that new diseases such as coronavirus will trigger a panic and a desire for market segregation that go beyond what is medically rational.” Instead, he suggested, “humanity needs some government somewhere” to be the “supercharged champion of the right of the populations of the Earth to buy and sell freely among each other”.

“As Covid deaths in the UK pass the grim milestone of 200,000, what have we learned?”
Devi Sridhar

This takes a bit of translating: the “autarkic rhetoric” was in fact people calling for a public health response to a new virus. “[S]ome government somewhere” was him appointing himself in that role as the “supercharged champion” of the free market – the free market that would defeat the virus rather than a public health policy.

This, then, was Johnson’s first reflex in the face of the pandemic. Every time I hear the phrase “he got the big calls right”, this speech echoes in my head.

By 3 March, he was boasting: “I was at a hospital the other night where I think a few there were actually coronavirus patients and I shook hands with everybody, you’ll be pleased to know, and I continue to shake hands.”

As late as 13 March, three scientists advising the government all talked to the media on the same day of “herd immunity” being the way to “stop” the virus. This newspaper has shown many times that this was both misguided and bad science, probably confusing the resistant response we build up in our bodies in the present with the kinds of “vertical” immunity that living forms build up through evolution; that is, through the elimination of breeding individuals unable to resist a virus or bacterium.

I came out of my dose of Covid and my time in intensive care not being able to stand up or walk, with one eye hardly seeing and one ear hardly hearing. Micro-bleeds in my brain have permanently knocked out the respective optic and auditory nerves. I readily admit that I look at the comments by Johnson and those scientists and feel aggrieved. And I’m not even the loved one of someone who died in that time. I’m not a health worker who lost a colleague at the very moment the PPE was insufficient or poor. On one occasion the PPE that came into my ward was secondhand and one piece had blood on it (as testified by the consultant).

I have been in meetings with people in this situation and many feel desolate, betrayed and abandoned. All the more so, when they hear people telling us that it was a “scamdemic” or that we had underlying health problems or that we were so old we were going to cop it soon anyway. One famous journalist reassured me that she knew I had been ill, “but,” she added, “you are 74”. That “but” is doing a lot of work. What’s “but” about being 74? Are my days less valid than her days, I asked myself. What kind of social contract do we have with each other in which I can be dispensable because I’m 74?

Meanwhile, this great invention, the NHS, saved my life, taught me how to walk, helped me help myself get fit, through the gloriously cooperative labours, skills, knowledge and experience of hundreds of people, many from (or with origins in) many different parts of the world. When I meet any of the nurses, doctors, physios or occupational therapists who looked after me, I am moved to tears.

To my mind, they represent the best of us; togetherness in the face of danger and loss. And, take it from me, they have suffered and are still suffering. Some have been unable to go back to the wards. When I signed permission for me to be put into induced sleep, I was told I had a 50:50 chance of waking up. It turned out to be a slightly better ratio: 58% of us survived; 42% died. That’s a lot of death for young health workers to cope with.

Actually, 200,000 is a lot of death for all of us to cope with. I wait – and keep waiting – for that national moment, that service in St Paul’s, that official gathering where we can all reflect at the same time on what has happened to us. Because the deaths have happened to us as individuals – and not in a public shared way, in some horrific act of war or genocide – it has become easier to tidy it away. The burden of the national and social trauma is being carried by us in our families and personal relationships. It’s almost as if this government that went into the pandemic mocking the public health response is afraid of our tears and our rage.

New Coronavirus News from 15 Jul 2022

Mads Pedersen wins stage 13 as Tour de France criticised over Covid and crowds [The Guardian, 15 July 2022]

by Jeremy Whittle

Danish sprinter Mads Pedersen, of Trek-Segafredo, took victory in the 13th stage from Le Bourg d’Oisans to Saint-Étienne, after a high-powered seven-rider breakaway dissolved on the rolling roads west of the Rhône.

Chased across the Isère and Rhône by the peloton, the breakaway included south London’s Fred Wright, of the Bahrain Victorious team. The 23-year-old slipped clear in the final kilometres with former World Road Race champion Pedersen and Hugo Houle, but the Dane’s sprint proved irresistible.

“I’m a bit gutted to be honest,” Wright said, after taking second place. “I tried, so second is pretty good, but I wanted that win. I needed to attack on the last climb but that tempo was as hard as I could go. After we got over it, it was like: ‘Damn, it’s going to be a sprint and I won’t be able to beat him [Pedersen].’”

“I’m learning,” Wright said of his efforts. “I’ll do it better next time. Maybe not this Tour, but at some point there will be a next time.”

The heat was on as the fatigued peloton rolled out of the Alps towards the Rhône valley, with riders constantly dousing themselves with water, as temperatures in the high thirties settled on central France.

Health and safety has never been a priority for a race that fetishises gladiatorial suffering, but on a day that a nine-year-old boy was hit by a race vehicle but avoided serious injury, promoters ASO have been criticised for both their Covid protocols and their crowd control after Tom Pidcock’s win on Alpe d’Huez on Thursday.

The Belgian newspaper Het Laatste Nieuws published criticism of rider safety on the Alpe, known as “the Glastonbury of cycling fans”, accusing the race organisers of a lack of respect, as riders were surrounded by fans shouting in their faces and running alongside at key moments.

“It is a miracle of God that no accidents happen,” the newspaper said. “For four years the Tour de France has not been on Alpe d’Huez. Better it stays away for the next 40 years too, if it has to. If organiser ASO refuses to create distance between riders and public, that is a lack of respect.”

Meanwhile, just two days after he had come close to winning the stage to the Col du Granon, the French climber Warren Barguil became the latest rider to test positive for Covid, making his Arkéa-Samsic squad the fifth team so far to lose a rider due to the virus.

On Thursday, the Belgian association of sports doctors (SKA) also accused ASO of not adhering to the best Covid testing protocols. In a statement the SKA cited sources within the peloton, including “doctors or riders,” saying that the “tests carried out by ASO do not follow a strict protocol, and the swab is not inserted far enough into the nose.”

There was widespread disbelief when all the Covid tests taken last Sunday evening were pronounced negative. Tom Teulingkx, a sports doctor and president of the SKA, said the situation was “unworthy of an organisation like ASO”.

“If ASO declares that there is no positive case, it should be taken with caution,” the SKA said. “Fortunately, there are many doctors in teams who take their responsibilities by redoing the tests themselves.

“These are often done at the request of riders who have little confidence in ASO. If you cannot provide quality support, you give riders and those around them a false sense of security. Coronavirus is a disease, not an injury.”

As the race goes on there are expected to be more positive results, particularly in the aftermath of the unruly scenes on Alpe d’Huez on Thursday, a climb on which, despite the former Tour winner Vincenzo Nibali being brought down by a fan in 2018 and forced to abandon the Tour with a fractured vertebra, promises of increased security from ASO have not materialised.

Race leader Jonas Vingegaard seemed resigned to the situation. “Of course it’s a big risk to get Covid when a lot of spectators are shouting in your face,” he said. “I think that’s obvious to everyone. I guess that’s how it is. We just hope for the best.”

Meanwhile speculation surrounds the future of Mark Cavendish, who was left out of the race by his current sponsor, Quick-Step Alpha Vinyl. The Tour rumour mill has linked him to both Israel-Premier Tech and the EF Education-EasyPost team, although negotiations with the American team are believed to have stalled.

UK Covid infections rise by almost 30% in a week [The Guardian, 15 July 2022]

by Nicola Davis

Around 3.5 million people thought to have disease in first week of July
Covid infection levels in the UK have risen by almost 30% in a week, with an estimated 3.5 million people thought to have had the disease in the first week of July, as a leading epidemiologist called for a return of free lateral flow tests.

Figures from the Office for National Statistics based on swabs collected from randomly selected households show that 2,873,600 people in the community in England are estimated to have had Covid in the week ending 6 July – about one in 19 people. The week before, the figure was 2,154,000 people – or about one in 25.

Increases were also seen in other parts of the UK with an estimated one in 16 people in Scotland and one in 17 in both Wales and Northern Ireland thought to have had Covid in the most recent week.

Overall, about 3,498,700 people across the UK are thought to have had Covid in the most recent week, according to the survey estimates, up from 2,714,900 the week before – a rise of 28.9%.

“Infections are showing no signs of decreasing, with rates approaching levels last seen in March this year at the peak of the Omicron BA.2 wave,” said Sarah Crofts, head of analytical outputs for the Covid-19 Infection Survey.

“Rates have continued to increase across the UK and among all age groups. We will continue to closely monitor the data.”

While not yet reaching peak infection levels seen earlier this year, when about one in 13 people in England had Covid, the latest estimates are the highest yet for a summer month.

At present, infection levels are highest in the east of England, with an estimated 5.9% of people thought to have Covid in the most recent week, and among those aged from school year 12 to age 24, for which the figure was 6.5%.

Prof Rowland Kao, an epidemiologist at the University of Edinburgh, said it is unclear how much of the rise can be attributed to the wider circulation of Covid variants and how much may be down to a decline in vaccine-induced immunity or increased transmissibility of variants such as BA.4 and BA.5. Factors such as increases in contact, Kao added, are also expected to play a role.

“A slow decline in rates in Scotland does [suggest] that this is a wave that will decline again but we may be subject to further waves, especially as variants of concern will likely continue to arise,” said Kao.

“We may never experience the severe impacts of the first few waves of Covid, but we may experience several severe bumps in the road going forward, especially if Covid is combined with rises in other respiratory infections in the winter, which is likely.”

Concerns have also been raised as a result of increasing hospitalisations involving people with Covid, with hospital admissions figures approaching the peaks seen in previous waves this year. Figures for patients primarily being treated for Covid are also increasing, with data from NHS England showing a rise from 2,165 on 21 June to 4,693 on 12 July.

“My fear is that we shall now routinely face summer pressures of a kind only previously seen during winter,” said Dr Naru Narayanan, president of the HCSA, the hospital doctors’ union. “In the short term, we need more stringent infection controls, but let’s be clear that much of the current crisis predates the pandemic.”

Kao cautioned against behaving as though Covid doesn’t exist any more, noting those who are eligible should get their booster jab, while it is still important for people to isolate if they are infected.

He added that making lateral flow tests free once more would be enormously valuable, “so long as people were also encouraged to use them especially when entering risky situations such as going to crowded locations or on public transport”. Kao also backed the use of protective FFP2 masks in places with a high risk of contact.