Just skimmed the article, but I think they’re saying that all previous variants (including natural ones as well as any lab-derived original ones) arose through base/amino acid substitutions, and this is the first one known to occur because of recombination between two different variants.
I guess it’s more of academic interest than anything else though. 
I gathered that (although presumably recombinant variants could have been created in a lab). I was just mocking the (implied) idea that substitutions of patented codon sequences arose by natural selection 
The bottom inspectors truly are relentless:
A bit rich of the Grauniad to champion the victims’ cause.
And all for nothing anyway. Parties at Downing Street. The health minister meeting his bit on the side. Lockdown pusher Ferguson doing the same.
But that guy who ate a burger in his car deserves a fine.
The police did a good job though. Easier to fine someone for meeting his family at new year’s than catch criminals.
What utter fecking nonsense. As @BigDave said, if the police and magistrates were as zealous as prosecuting actual criminals as prosecuting people for eating a burger, England might not look like the shithole that it does. The police and the judiciary have utterly disgraced themselves.
I’m quite surprised nobody has attempted to escalate this to the Supreme Court (Appeals?). The Coronavirus Act 2020 and the accompanying “mandates” served no purpose whatsoever - and I don’t think anyone in authority seriously pretends that it did. The legislation was therefore in clear violation of various accords on Human Rights - which is supposed to be a cornerstone of modern British Law - and should never have been enacted in the first place.
More frantic backpedalling from the supporters of censorship in the MSM, feigning surprise at the discovery of a worldwide conspiracy to shut down social media dissent:
“The injunction came after it was revealed last month that UK ministers set up a counter-disinformation unit, which was used to target lockdown critics and those questioning the mass vaccination of children.”
It wasn’t even a secret FFS. The policy documents were on the interwebs for anyone to read.
The political class in the UK did not exactly distinguish themselves during the pandemic. Do as I say, and not as I do is a rarely a good look. Yet here we are in 2023 and the Conservatives remain in power . . . 
Guy
Well we have to wait for an election
As an outsider, I hope you can find better leadership than this.
Guy
That wasn’t really the point, though. There was absolutely nothing wrong with them having parties and whatnot; it was their right as human beings, just as it was everyone else’s right (denied to them by the Surveillance State and an overzealous police force). Did the politicians die en masse? Did they kill their grannies? Of course not.
IMO it was a deliberate “fuck you” to the plebs. They knew it was all theatre - in fact they admitted as much in various unguarded moments. The aim was merely to reinforce the idea that there was a “dangerous pandemic”.
Not just “The Conservatives”, but the architects of Britain’s demise. The people who brought the country to its knees have been rewarded with promotions. Labour would have been worse by far - barely a day went by that Keir Starmer or one of his barely-GCSE’d acolytes was screaming for more lockdowns and more flouting of the law. I was reading somewhere that the government came this close to actually shutting down Parliamentary debate and ruling by decree (that is, by means of Orders issued by the Privy Council and approved by the Queen). The only reason they didn’t was that the Queen and Prince Charles were (supposedly) “self-isolating” - which makes me wonder exactly what they were isolating themselves from. Political shenanigans, possibly.
If it isn’t obvious by now, there’s something rather sinister going on.
Why some people had asymptomatic covid infection:
People with HLA-B*15:01 and previous exposure to common cold coronaviruses establish a memory T-cell response that is cross-reactive with SARS-CoV-2 due to a similar epitope, contributing to asymptomatic infection.
Reminded me of this, published in the British Medical Journal back in September 2020:
Covid-19: Do many people have pre-existing immunity?
Not so novel coronavirus?
“At least six studies have reported T cell reactivity against SARS-CoV-2 in 20% to 50% of people with no known exposure to the virus.” 5678910
Everyone calls SARS-CoV-2 ‘the Coronavirus’ but Coronaviruses are a group of related RNA viruses which have some similarities.
In the beginning they said ‘novel’ mostly because it was found in bats, but has not infected humans until Wuhan happened.
Yes. I found that out early 2020. Maybe earlier, maybe later than some 
I think that’s been pretty well known among anyone discussing it since like mid-2020 and doesn’t need to be explained? Words can have different meaning in different contexts, and people can use “coronavirus” to refer to this particular coronavirus while being fully aware that there are other coronaviruses. Similar with “the pandemic” - it’s of course not the only pandemic that’s ever happened, but everyone currently living on the planet knows which pandemic is being referred to.
Yeah, the WHO definitely missed an opportunity in 2021 or so to rebrand it as “the boring coronavirus”…
As a side note, the sentence, “Not so novel coronavirus?” above was actually a subheading taken from the BMJ text itself and written by Peter Doshi, PhD, associate professor at the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy and senior editor at The British Medical Journal. It wasn’t written by myself
My goodness. It’s almost as if humans have an immune system which works pretty damn well even in the absence of magic vaccines. Whoever would have guessed?
Too bad for those who have not been exposed to those previous viruses and were symptomatic with a more dangerous variant.
I wish there would be some method to trigger an immune response for them before they got sick… /s
Your wish came true. Up to 50% may already have had pre-immunity. And then we have immunity from covid infections itself, where 99.6% of covid infections are actually mild or with zero symptoms. Only a tiny fraction get seriously ill. US CDC stated on 5% died solely of covid, with 95% of “covid deaths” actually having 4 other comorbidities, on average.
“The natural immune protection that develops after a SARS-CoV-2 infection offers considerably more of a shield against the Delta variant of the pandemic coronavirus than two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, according to a large Israeli study… The newly released data show people who once had a SARS-CoV-2 infection were much less likely than never-infected, vaccinated people to get Delta, develop symptoms from it, or become hospitalized with serious COVID-19.”
Once again with feeling:
Let nature takes its course!
Or something like that.
Guy
Except that clearly wasn’t the problem, was it? Children - who have had less exposure to coronaviruses in general - had virtually no problems with COVID-19. Far and away the biggest demographic affected were those who were old and sick, who must have been exposed to every virus under the sun. Now, you might possibly go off on a tangent about “original antigenic sin” and suchlike, but it seems blatantly obvious to me that, while the observations mentioned by you and @FairComment may satisfactorily explain why lots of people didn’t get sick at all, it probably has nothing to do with why some people ended up in hospital and/or dead.
No, it wasn’t “something like that”. I don’t think you’re daft enough to have actually misunderstood the arguments being made, so presumably you’re doing it deliberately.