By Reuters Staff
LONDON
(Reuters) - Britain has detected 77 cases of the South African variant of
COVID-19, the health minister said on Sunday, also urging people to strictly
follow lockdown rules as the best precaution against Britain’s own potentially
more deadly variant.
Matt Hancock said all 77 cases were
connected to travel from South Africa and were under close observation, as were
nine identified cases of a Brazilian variant.
“They are under very close
observation, and we have enhanced contact tracing to do everything we possibly
can to stop them from spreading,” he said during an interview on BBC
television.
Oxford professor Anthony Harnden,
deputy chair of a scientific committee on vaccination that advises the
government, said the South African and Brazilian variants were of concern
because COVID-19 vaccines may not be effective against them.
“The new variants abroad are a real
worry. The South African and the Brazilian Amazonian ones, there are hints that
there will be vaccine escape,” he said on Sky News, adding that new variants
would keep appearing around the world.
Britain has the highest death toll
in Europe from COVID-19, at close to 100,000, and has been in lockdown for most
of January with hospitals struggling to cope with record numbers of seriously
ill COVID patients.
The government has attributed the
high transmission rates that led it to impose the lockdown in part to a highly
contagious variant first identified in southeast England and now prevalent in
many areas.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson said on
Friday the English variant may be associated with a higher level of mortality,
although scientists have said the evidence on that remained uncertain, a
message Hancock re-emphasised on Sunday.
More
https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-health-coronavirus-britain-variants/uk-detects-77-cases-of-south-african-covid-variant-nine-of-brazilian-idUSKBN29T07E
“What We’re
Dealing with Now Is a New Pandemic” Can We Stop a Super Coronavirus? The new variants of the coronavirus are
even more dangerous than those known so far. Researchers and politicians fear a
sharp increase in the number of infections, with dramatic consequences like
those seen in Britain. Can Germany still stop the new killers?
By Matthias Bartsch , Felix Bohr , Rafaela von Bredow , Hubert Gude , Veronika Hackenbroch , Martin Knobbe , Kerstin Kullmann , Cornelia Schmergal , Thomas Schulz , Gerald Traufetter und Steffen Winter
19.01.2021, 01.48 Uhr
---- Be it in
Switzerland, the Netherlands or the United States – wherever viral genomes are
now being sequenced, researchers are coming across traces of the English
mutant. The B.1.351 variant from South Africa has already spread into
neighboring Botswana, but the first cases have also been detected in Britain –
as if one mutant were now competing against the other.
A variant of the coronavirus from
Brazil also popped up in Japan in early January. Evidence is also mounting that
the Brazilian and South African mutants can infect people who have already had
COVID-19.
That would mean that there is either
no immunity to the new variants, or that such immunity is weak. Future research
will have to determine whether that is the case. No one knows yet what the
implications of the mutations are.
What we do know, though, is that the
combination of the one common mutation together with certain other changes in
the genome has produced variants that are highly contagious. Is this the
coronavirus of the future? Will each variant now mutate in ways to make it more
contagious, creating deadly perfection?
"I think that the virus is just
finding its optimal configuration”, says Cillian De Gascun, director of
the National Virus Reference Laboratory at University College Dublin. That the
same mutation occurred in all the variants independently of each other
suggests "that this is a configuration that the virus likes,” says De
Gascun. "And there's no reason to believe that it won't become more
efficient over time.”
Experiments are now underway at
major biomedical laboratories in South Africa, as well as at vaccine
manufacturers, to determine whether the biggest worry of all is justified: that
the vaccines will be less effective against the various new variants. Those
experiments include exposing the virus to the blood serum of vaccinated
patients.
If the virus survives, then humanity
has a big problem.
"What we’re dealing with now is
a new pandemic," says epidemiologist Kucharski. It could turn out that
what we have learned so far and the methods that have been used to combat the
disease are no longer valid. Against that backdrop, the researcher recommends
that new variants be treated "as a new threat, not thinking, 'well, we've
already got lots of COVID cases, so this is just a bit more of the same
problem'."
But how is it that such malignant
new variants of the virus emerged so suddenly and simultaneously? As
epidemiologist Emma Hodcroft from the Institute of Social and Preventive
Medicine at the University of Bern explains, the common mutation has already
occurred several times in the various coronavirus variants whose genetic
material was examined last year – and remained inconspicuous.
"It is likely," the
British-American scientist explains, "that it is a combination of
different mutations plus N501Y that really changes the virus and makes it more
transmissible."
More
https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/can-germany-stop-the-new-supervirus-a-e9ffc207-0015-4330-8361-b306f6053e15?sara_ecid=nl_upd_1jtzCCtmxpVo9GAZr2b4X8GquyeAc9&nlid=bfjpqhxz
Covid-19: Top adviser warns
France at 'emergency' virus moment Published
5 hours ago
France's top medical advisor said on Sunday that a third
national lockdown would probably soon be needed to combat coronavirus in the
country.
A strict curfew was implemented last weekend, but cases
continue to climb.
Prof Jean-Francois Delfraissy, head of the scientific
council that advises leaders on Covid-19, said "there is an
emergency" and this week was critical.
He called for swift government action, amid rising concerns
about the spread of new variants of the coronavirus.
Prof Delfraissy said data showed a new more transmissible
variant first detected in the UK now makes up between 7-9% of cases in some
French regions and will be hard to stop.
He said the country was in a better situation than others
in Europe, but described the new variants as the "equivalent of a second
pandemic".
"If we do not tighten regulations, we will find
ourselves in an extremely difficult situation from mid-March," the
advisor warned during an interview with BFM television .
The French government is expected to meet on Wednesday to
decide if further measures are needed.
Officials have so far resisted
implementing a third national lockdown, preferring an overnight curfew system
which allows schools to stay open.
But daily infection numbers are
rising - with the seven-day moving average now above 20,000 despite the 18:00
curfew.
More
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-55791389
New Coronavirus Variants
Complicate the Battle Against the Pandemic Mutations may delay a return to normal as faster-spreading
strains could make people sicker or render vaccines less effective Updated Jan. 24, 2021 4:55 pm ET
The emergence of new variants of the virus that causes Covid-19 —including
one in the U.K. that British officials say could be more deadly than earlier
versions—signals a future in which health authorities are locked in a
cat-and-mouse battle with a shape-shifting pathogen.
Faster-spreading coronavirus strains that researchers fear
could also make people sicker or render vaccines less effective threaten to
extend lockdowns and lead to more hospitalizations and deaths, epidemiologists
caution. But, they said, it doesn’t mean the contagion can’t be contained.
“We’re living in a world where coronavirus is so prevalent
and rapidly mutating that there are going to be new variants that pop up,”
Anthony Harnden, a physician who advises the U.K. government, told Sky
News. “We may well be in a situation where we end up having to have an
annual coronavirus vaccine” to cope with emerging strains.
As
the new variant in the U.K. has spread across the country, hospitals have been under more strain than they were in the
first wave of the pandemic in the spring, and the national Covid-19 death toll
is expected to surpass 100,000 in coming days. But in the week ended Sunday,
new daily cases were down 22% from the previous seven days.
----Jeffrey Barrett, director of the Covid-19 Genomics
Initiative at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, said the huge number of cases
around the world has given the virus a lot of opportunities to evolve in ways
not seen earlier in the pandemic.
“We’re going to have to really contend with these new
variants in the virus in the next phase of the pandemic,” he told an online
seminar last week. “Something happened that basically allowed a new
constellation of mutations to arise,” presenting scientists with new
challenges.
The variants likely delay the day when life can get back
closer to normal thanks to vaccines and raise the prospect of outbreaks of
infections periodically even after large numbers of people are inoculated. And
their emergence also suggests that international travel restrictions—where
governments impose bans on people coming from places where more troubling
versions of the virus are prevalent—could be in place intermittently for years.
-----The U.K. announcement on Friday that the British variant
that now dominates infections across the country—and is also well-entrenched in the U.S. —could be more deadly than earlier versions of the virus is
preliminary and could be unduly pessimistic.
It is based on the assessment of an expert advisory
panel to the government that in turn used four separate academic studies
of raw data to decide that there was a “realistic possibility” that the variant
was deadlier.
The studies suggested that a greater proportion of people
with this variant were ending up in the hospital or dying. It didn’t suggest
that once in the hospital a patient was more likely to die than if he or she
had been hospitalized with an earlier variant.
Faster-spreading variants imply that, for any given level
of restrictions, cases will rise more rapidly or fall more slowly than with
earlier versions. That suggests lockdowns, other things being equal, would have
to last longer to bring cases down.
More
https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-coronavirus-variants-complicate-the-battle-against-the-pandemic-11611518097
Next, some vaccine links
kindly sent along from a LIR reader in Canada. The links come from a most
informative update from Stanford Hospital in California.
World
Health Organization - Landscape of COVID-19 candidate vaccines . https://www.who.int/publications/m/item/draft-landscape-of-covid-19-candidate-vaccines
NY
Times Coronavirus Vaccine Tracker . https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/science/coronavirus-vaccine-tracker.html
Stanford
Website . https://racetoacure.stanford.edu/clinical-trials/132
Regulatory
Focus COVID-19 vaccine tracker . https://www.raps.org/news-and-articles/news-articles/2020/3/covid-19-vaccine-tracker
Some other useful Covid links.
Johns Hopkins Coronavirus
resource centre
https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html
Rt Covid-19
https://rt.live/
Covid19info.live
https://wuflu.live/
Centers for Disease Control
Coronavirus
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/index.html
The Spectator
https://data.spectator.co.uk/city/national
Technology Update.
With events happening
fast in the development of solar power and graphene, I’ve added this section.
Updates as they get reported.
World-first home hydrogen battery stores 3x the energy of a Powerwall 2 By Loz Blain January 22, 2021
Lavo
To get off the grid with home solar, you need to be able to
generate energy when the Sun's out, and store it for when it's not. Normally,
people do this with lithium battery systems – Tesla's Powerwall 2 is an
example. But Australian company Lavo has built a rather spunky (if chunky)
cabinet that can sit on the side of your house and store your excess energy as
hydrogen.
The Lavo Green Energy Storage System measures 1,680 x 1,240
x 400 mm (66 x 49 x 15.7 inches) and weighs a meaty 324 kg (714 lb), making it
very unlikely to be pocketed by a thief. You connect it to your solar inverter
(it has to be a hybrid one) and the mains water (through a purification unit),
and sit back as it uses excess energy to electrolyze the water, releasing
oxygen and storing the hydrogen in a patented metal hydride "sponge"
at a pressure of 30 bar, or 435 psi.
It stores some 40 kilowatt-hours worth of energy, three
times as much as Tesla's current Powerwall 2 and enough to run an average home
for two days. And when that energy is needed, it uses a fuel cell to deliver
energy into the home, adding a small 5-kWh lithium buffer battery for
instantaneous response. There's Wi-Fi connectivity, and a phone app for
monitoring and control, and businesses with higher power needs can run several
in parallel to form an "intelligent virtual power plant."
At AU$34,750 (US$26,900), it costs more than what you'd pay
for three Powerwalls in Australia, but not by a huge amount, and that price is
set to drop to AU$29,450 (US$22,800) in the last quarter of 2022, by which
point Lavo says it'll be available internationally.
---- Then there's the efficiency. Batteries store and release energy with
minimal losses; for every kilowatt-hour your rooftop array generates and sticks
into a battery, you'll get back more than 90 percent of it. But the process of
generating hydrogen by electrolysis using a proton exchange membrane is only
about 80 percent efficient, so you lose 20 percent straight away. And at the
other end, you'll lose somewhere around half of what you've got stored in the
process of converting the hydrogen back into energy through a fuel cell.
So not only does it take more energy
to fill up, a 40-kWh hydrogen energy storage system might start looking a lot
like a 20-kWh system when you actually try to get the energy back out of it.
The Lavo folks say this system's "round-trip efficiency is above 50
percent," so taking them at their word, you're still tossing out roughly
as much energy as you're keeping.
More
https://newatlas.com/energy/lavo-home-hydrogen-battery-storage/
Electric-Vehicle Surge Sends Cobalt Prices Soaring China controls big chunk
of market for key metal in car batteries that is mined largely in Africa Jan. 22, 2021 11:38 am ET
A 20% rise in the price of cobalt since the beginning of
this year shows how the rush to build more electric vehicles is stressing
global supply chains.
Already a shortage of semiconductors
“The demand is not going to shrink any time soon, while the
supply remains tight mainly due to logistics disruptions in South Africa during
the pandemic,” said Ying Lu, an analyst at London-based commodity
research firm Roskill.
Energy-dense cobalt is used as the stabilizer in batteries.
It helps protect the battery’s cathode from corrosion that can lead to a fire.
A majority of the world’s cobalt is mined in the Democratic
Republic of the Congo in central Africa. It typically is carried overland to
South Africa, shipped out from the port of Durban, South Africa, and processed
in China before the material goes to battery makers—meaning the supply chain
has several choke points that make it vulnerable to disruption.
In 2017 and 2018, during an earlier rush of interest in
EVs, the price of cobalt quadrupled in the space of two years before a boost in
production calmed the market down. Recent moves aren’t as extreme, but the spot
price of cobalt rose to $38,520 a ton as of Jan. 21, according to Futuresource,
up 20% since the end of December.
The election of President Biden as well as recent
climate-change initiatives by China and Japan have accelerated a shift to
electric vehicles. Tesla 20 million vehicles annually
More EVs mean more batteries. They account for about 40% of
an EV’s cost, according to a report published by China-based Guotai Junan Securities
More
https://www.wsj.com/articles/electric-vehicle-surge-sends-cobalt-prices-soaring-11611333538?mod=mhp
U.S. Is Losing the Battery Race Despite Having the Right Stuff Raw materials? Yes.
Demand? Yes. So what’s the problem? January 22, 2021, 4:00 AM EST
The U.S. isn’t just losing the battery race—it’s barely in
the running. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
China dominates lithium-ion battery production and is
building factories at breakneck speed. Europe, too, is adding battery plants as
its power grid and car companies shift away from fossil fuels. Although a few
factories are planned in the U.S., including Tesla Inc. Texas plant
Yet the U.S. has most of the ingredients it needs for a
battery-building industry. It has the raw materials, with three companies
developing facilities to extract lithium from subsurface brine in the Southern California desert plugging big batteries
More
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-22/how-the-u-s-can-compete-with-china-europe-in-building-batteries
Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen
goods.
H. L. Mencken.
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