Thinking Allowed

medical / technology / education / art / flub

Eeek! or E484K mutation and the coronavirus pandemic

Rupert Beale · Eeek! · LRB 19 February 2021:

"Uncontrolled spread – as we knew it would – led to an even greater wave of infections, hospitalisations and deaths than last spring. Children were sent to school for one day before the necessary ‘lockdown’ was reimposed. The impulse to keep schools open where possible is laudable; children have been educationally disadvantaged by online-only learning and don’t often get seriously ill with the virus. They can, however, efficiently spread it to one another and to potentially more vulnerable adults. The single day of mixing in January will have contributed nothing to their education but will have caused many deaths."

The E484K mutation of SARS-CoV-2 from Brazil and South Africa is apparently nicknamed Eeek! by biologists. Not necessarily for its danger but just because it looks like it.

Good read in the London Review of Books. How will we end this pandemic of COVID-19? Will we have annual booster vaccines, or vaccines every other year, or not at all?

Source: www.lrb.co.uk

eeek e484k mutation vaccines spread deaths children pandemic