Quarantine hotels also hand out towels
Any results in from todayās presser?
Guy
4 = 3 local, 1 imported
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My humble grovelling apologies to all. Yes I was out, having a longish (but dry) lunch. 
'A new Covid variant identified in South Africa - with warnings it is worse than Delta - was detected at the New Zealand border.
A new preprint study by South Africaās National Institute for Communicable Diseases warns the new variant has āmutated substantiallyā and is more mutations away from the original virus detected in Wuhan than any other variant previously detected.
The new variant, known as C. 1.2, first emerged in South Africa but has also been detected here, as well as England, China, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mauritius, Portugal and Switzerland.ā
Itās time to seal off the borders.
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So uhhhā¦ Epsilon?
Thereās no indication that itās worse on any meaningful metric. Itās just different. AFAIK nobody has attempted to measure vaccine efficacy.
Thatās what they thought about Delta when it came up. Timeās up.
If it wasnāt worse it wouldnāt spread.
Not true. Not so serious viruses can spread just fine, and worse ones tend to burn themselves out faster.
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Well? They were right, werenāt they? Delta spreads more effectively, but people who were not susceptible to older variants are still not susceptible to delta (which is what youād expect), at least to a first approximation. Neither is delta inherently more virulent. The vaccine works after a fashion. So whatās the problem? And more importantly, what do you expect to do about it, other than run around screaming?
Iāve no idea where you get your info from.
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Oh Iām sure he could rattle off a list of anti-vax friendly sites. But the better question might be where do his sources get their info fromā¦.?
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The US CDC. The British Office of National Statistics. Public Health England. You know, all the well-known conspiracy-theory sites and anti-vaxers. Iām guessing you donāt bother looking at these and prefer to just watch TV instead.
Have you even read that paper? Can you point out the line where it says itās more dangerous?
I dunno. Where do governments get their information from? Maybe they just make it up? Iām not discounting the possibility. My experience so far, though, is that they tell the truth, because the know the average man in the street is too lazy to look at it, or wonāt be able to wade through the complexity (or in a few cases, deliberate obfuscation, but thatās surprisingly rare).
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Mu! But this is even another one.
"The World Health Organization has said it is monitoring a new coronavirus variant known as āMuā, which was first identified in Colombia in January.
Mu, known scientifically as B.1.621, has been classified as a āvariant of interestā, the global health body said Tuesday in its weekly pandemic bulletin.
The WHO said the variant has mutations that indicate a risk of resistance to vaccines and stressed that further studies were needed to better understand it.
āThe Mu variant has a constellation of mutations that indicate potential properties of immune escape,ā the bulletin said.ā
Do they not know the Greek Alphabet?