What are some of the concerns about the new variant of SARS-CoV-2 with respect to transmission, number of fatalities, and its impact on children? December 29, 2020December 29, 2020Dr. Barry Dworkin Medical Mythbusting Commentary for December 29, 2020 [display_podcast] Source: B.1.1.7, A New Variant Of Covid-19, Isn’t Kidding Around. What We Know About A Fast-Spreading Mutant And Its Effect On Children Why a SARS-CoV-2 variant that's 50% more transmissible would in general be a much bigger problem than a variant that's 50% more deadly. A short thread… 1/— Adam Kucharski (@AdamJKucharski) December 28, 2020 As an example, suppose current R=1.1, infection fatality risk is 0.8%, generation time is 6 days, and 10k people infected (plausible for many European cities recently). So we'd expect 10000 x 1.1^5 x 0.8% = 129 eventual new fatalities after a month of spread… 2/— Adam Kucharski (@AdamJKucharski) December 28, 2020 Now suppose transmissibility increases by 50%. By above, we'd expect 10000 x (1.1 x 1.5)^5 x 0.8% = 978 eventual new fatalities after a month of spread. 4/— Adam Kucharski (@AdamJKucharski) December 28, 2020 The above is just an illustrative example, but the key message: an increase in something that grows exponentially (i.e. transmission) can have far more effect than the same proportional increase in something that just scales an outcome (i.e. severity). 5/5— Adam Kucharski (@AdamJKucharski) December 28, 2020 Related posts: Retrospective study finds that the flu vaccine has benefits against severe effects of COVID-19. How it does this remains unknown but if true, it will be fascinating and enlightening to figure out how our immune response works in this setting. Prepare for what is coming over the next two weeks. It is expected and not a reflection that staying at home is not working. This is the past two weeks now percolating through to the present. PM Trudeau, your flouting of pandemic health policy rules demoralizes the country. Armchair “physicians”, stop flaunting cherry-picked preprint studies as “the” evidence HCQ works when there are just as many that refute it. That is why proper investigation and meta-analysis are required. Los Alamos Lab uses computational analysis of 6000 coronavirus sequences to conclude that a mutated strain is now dominant. Clinical implications remain unknown and study needs to be peer -reviewed and published. Covid-19mutationSARS-CoV-2