Today, Explained - The virus gets more contagious

Episode Date: January 5, 2021

Viruses mutate, but this time it’s different. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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And today, we're going to explain the news with the help of Brian Resnick. He's a senior science reporter here at Vox.com. Brian, what's the virus up to? There are some concerning things about mutations in the news. And then there are also some things about it where we don't have to freak out, freak out. So if I can walk you, you want me to walk you through it? Okay. This will be a metaphorical walk.

We haven't taken a walk together in a long time. This will be nice. So the background here is viruses, especially the virus type that is SARS-CoV-2, changes all the time. When it gets into a body, it goes in and it replicates and makes copies of itself. It makes millions of copies, billions even. And every time the virus makes a copy of itself, makes a copy of its genetic material, it might make like a little typo. So you can think of like the virus's genetics as like a list of letters. A, U, G, C, U, A, U. And you know, every time it copies itself, it might change a letter or might make one

mistake. A, U, A, C, U, A, U. Most of the time, this doesn't mean anything. It's just a one-letter change. It doesn't change anything about the virus. Sometimes these changes even make the virus weaker in some way. But then what happens after that is natural selection. This is just like basic evolution where if there are millions of variants of a virus and one is just like a little more successful at something than another, then that one variant becomes the dominant one. And that's what we're looking at here with some of this news out of the UK.

This new highly contagious strain is raising alarms around the world. Today, Britain's Prime Minister called an emergency meeting after putting much of the UK on lockdown. All this because of a new highly contagious variant of coronavirus spreading rapidly throughout the country, especially in and around London. This was first discovered in the UK, and there's also another variant of concerned in South Africa.

Basically, the virus has seemingly become more transmissible. It seems to jump from one person to another with greater ease. And some studies have shown that it might even be 50% more transmissible. 50%? This isn't really completely nailed down, but there's like enough evidence that's all pointing in the same direction about these variants, about these viral mutations, that all suggests like, wow, this should be a time of extra caution. What does that mean?

Like we have to stand 12 feet apart instead of six feet apart or wear like three masks instead of two? Yeah. So the gist is that these variants seem more transmissible, but they're not necessarily more virulent. It's not seeming that it's leading to more severe disease in it. Although, of course, anytime you have more infections, you have more chances for like bad outcomes. You have more deaths. You have like everything that goes along with the virus. But the virus hasn't dramatically changed. It's still SARS-CoV-2, it still spreads in the same way. All the things that you've been learning about,

about how to stop the spread still apply. There's nothing new for individuals to do, other than just be cautious, as they've had been, or maybe like this is news that should inspire them to be, you know, maybe more cautious when they've like known they've done something, you know, not ideal during the pandemic. Or perhaps in some cases be cautious for the very first time. Yeah. You know, it's, I think it's more of a, like, if you can imagine like in any given space that it's more likely for you to get the virus because this new variant seems to be more easily transmitted between people. Like, I think it's a good idea to add that into your mental risk calculus. Like, you know, should I take that trip?

Well, there's this new variant going around, so maybe it's a little scarier. And the scariest thing here is that this virus is much more contagious, which means it's much more likely to spread. Where has it spread so far? Do we know? The variant that most people are talking about first was discovered in the UK. And the UK does a lot of genetic sequencing of the virus. So like if you go in and get your nose swabbed, like there's a good chance in the UK that they'll check on the genetics of the virus that was in you and add it to like a big network that just tracks like viral changes. So this was first discovered there and has since been discovered really all around the world here in the US. I saw New York just yesterday. Yeah, in California and Colorado.

It's also been reported in Belgium and Germany, Ireland, France, Norway, Spain, Switzerland. You know, there's some parallel here a little bit to like even like the beginning of the pandemic, where, you know, like just as we were talking about, oh, maybe it will be in a lot of places, it already was like everywhere. And the U.S. does

much, much less genetic sequencing of the virus here. So we have like a less of an acute sense of where the variant is or even if other variants have emerged here, you know, if, you know, if we're not detecting, if we're not collecting samples of virus for genetic analysis, like we variant could arise here or wherever, and it's hard to know. But this strain has been called the UK virus because that's where it was first reported. Is there a chance that that's just where it was first noticed and that this has already been in several countries? Yeah, it's hard to say exactly where this originated from. It was first detected in the UK, and that also might be a consequence of that the UK just does a lot of viral genetics work there. There are some ideas of how this happened. in somebody with a compromised immune system where, you know, like I said, the virus is always like changing as it replicates itself. And if a body is like kind of weakly fighting off a virus over like months and months, then that gives the virus like a lot of opportunities to change,

which also then just underscores like, you know, we need to protect immune compromised people. We may need to vaccinate compromised people. We may need to vaccinate them earlier. We don't want to give this virus more and more chances to change. I think it's pretty clear that the United States is not doing enough, but does the fact that this has spread to so many countries imply that much of the world isn't doing enough? Well, I think it implies or it underscores that this has the potential to become like the dominant strain of this virus. So it was detected in the UK because there scientists noticed that a greater and greater proportion of new cases were due because of this viral variant.

That's kind of what we're seeing around the world. As this spreads silently, we don't detect where the virus moves at every turn. We've never had that clarity of detection, of surveillance. And if this variant is more easily transmitted between people, then it can quickly become the dominant form of the virus in an area. I know what you're wondering. Is the vaccine still effective against this mutation? I'll talk to Vox's resident vaccine reporter, Umair Irfan, about that after the break. Support for Today Explained comes from Aura. Aura believes that sharing pictures is a great way to keep up with family, and Aura says it's never been easier thanks to their digital picture frames.

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This deal is exclusive to listeners and available just in time for the holidays. Terms and conditions do apply. ways to customize your casino page with our new favorite and recently played games tabs. And to top it all off, quick and secure withdrawals. Get more everything with FanDuel Sportsbook and Casino. Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600. Visit connectsontario.ca. Umair Irfan, staff writer at Vox. Last month, the news about the pandemic got a lot more hopeful when we learned that two vaccines, which are both pretty darn effective at protecting people from COVID, had been approved. We talked to you about lots of questions people had. It seemed like the beginning of the end of the pandemic. Do these new mutations change that, or will these vaccines still protect people? Well, we don't know for sure, but in all likelihood, the answer is yes, these vaccines will probably stay effective for some time. Why do you say?

Well, there's a couple of different reasons. I mean, one is that because these vaccines are so very effective to begin with, we're talking 95% efficacy, even a diminished efficacy, you know, if you got down to 80% or lower, it would still be a very effective vaccine. The other thing also has to do with how the vaccine itself works. I mean, these vaccines, the Moderna vaccine and the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, they coach your immune system to make a part of the virus, the spike protein. OK. And there's actually multiple targets on the spike protein that your immune system can use to train itself. And it's very unlikely that you would see mutations in all of these components all at the same time.

There might be mutations in one or two places, but not in perhaps all the places that your immune system uses to recognize it. And finally, we kind of have some degree of real world experience with this because the generation of vaccines that we're using now, they were engineered to counter some of the earliest variants of the virus. And they're being tested in the real world right now against the more recent variations. And you know, these viruses, they mutate all the time. And so these vaccines have been quite competent at dealing with the variations that we've thrown at them so far. So it's very

likely that they'll be able to cope with quite a few more variants if we were to throw them at it. Okay, so chances are the vaccines still work, but the virus is potentially spreading even faster, at least this strain. are we going to be able to keep up? Well, that's a big question. I mean, right now, we want to vaccinate as many people as possible as fast as possible because we're already dealing with a devastating pandemic that's killing thousands of people per day.

And if that disease were to speed up its spread, that would make it all the more urgent to distribute these vaccines. However, what we've seen so far is that the United States in particular is really struggling to get these vaccines out into the arms of the people that actually need it. The new year has begun, unfortunately, with a halting start in addressing the pandemic. The U.S. is stumbling out of the gate, in particular, in the distribution of vaccines. You know, Operation Warp Speed, this government program to help develop and distribute these vaccines, they estimated that we would have about 20 million doses injected in people's arms by the end of December. And as of roughly this week, we've only had about 4.6 million doses administered. So we're very far short of the goals that the U.S. has set for itself.

So you're saying Operation Warp Speed got us to the vaccine historically fast, but has now slowed down? Yeah, that's right. I mean, this was always going to be a big challenge. And we've seen throughout the pandemic that the United States has kind of struggled with this aspect of it. You know, earlier in the pandemic, you may recall the shortages that we had in personal protective equipment for health workers or in testing and getting those out to all the places that were needed. Getting a vaccine out is even more complicated in terms of the logistics and, you know, has all these other extra constraints on it. Like the vaccine is only viable for a few hours once it's thawed. It has to be administered

as two doses. This is a medical product that has to be administered by people who are trained to do it. So it adds a few more layers on top of the existing logistics that we were dealing with before. And the fact that the U.S. struggled with some of the easier things shouldn't surprise us that we're now struggling with some of the harder things. I mean, I've been seeing stories that vaccines are actually being thrown away because people are mishandling them and not keeping them at the right temperatures. A Wisconsin hospital worker has been fired for intentionally removing COVID vaccine from a refrigerator, forcing that hospital to throw out more than 500 doses. Vaccines are being wasted in this country right now? Yeah, that's an unfortunate reality. I mean,

because of the haphazard approach and the fact that the federal government has basically left it up to the states, and a lot of states have left it up to counties, everybody's kind of doing their own thing here. You may recall in Florida, for instance, some counties were doing vaccines administered on a first-come, first-served basis, and that led to people over the age of 65 camping out overnight trying to get vaccines. The line stretched for miles this morning. People waiting in Daytona Beach, Florida for their COVID-19 vaccinations. It's been a long journey for everybody. And so we're lucky. We're lucky that we're getting it today. And then there were other places. You may recall that protest they had at the Stanford

University Health Center. First in the room, back in the line. First in the room, back in the line. Where they used an algorithm to try to figure out who should be eligible for vaccines. And it turned out some of the people they were awarding the vaccine to were doctors and health workers who didn't interact with patients at all. Whereas there were plenty of people who were interacting with patients who have COVID who weren't getting vaccinated. And then you had the governor of New York recently threatened to impose a million dollar fine on anybody who administers a vaccine to somebody out of turn. I don't want the vaccine in a refrigerator, a freezer. I want it in somebody's arm. So you have a whole bunch of different states and a whole bunch of different regions all doing their own kind of thing. And when you have this sort of haphazard approach,

yeah, it seems inevitable that something is going to go to waste, that some doses are not going to be used appropriately, and just some things are just going to get lost in the shuffle. Yeah, but I mean, it felt like developing the vaccine was this nearly impossible feat of science, and we pulled that off. Distributing a vaccine shouldn't be quite as hard, and we had all that time to figure it out, didn't we? I mean, that's the big frustration here. I mean, yes, this was definitely always going to be a problem. And, you know, government officials did see this coming. A lot of, you know, local health administrators were also warning that, you know, we're not very well equipped to do this right now. Many local health districts, for instance, were struggling with

funding. There was some funding that was appropriated in the recent, you know, COVID pandemic bailout. But, you know, they still need time to prepare all this infrastructure, right? It's not just having the vaccine and administering. You have to track the patients. And, you know, we're not going to have enough for everybody all at once. And so figuring out who goes to the front of the line, that requires its own level of monitoring patients and figuring out, you know, who exactly is most deserving or most urgently needs to be protected. So all this other level of administration is complicating things as well with the vaccine. Is anyone owning this failure,

Umair? Is it Dr. Fauci? Is it Trumpy? Is it Pencey? Is anyone owning this and saying, we blew it, we could have done a lot better? I don't think anybody has stepped forward to take responsibility for this just yet. But this is a failure that occurred in a lot of different levels. I mean, it's not just the federal government. I mean, I think a lot of states also had time to prepare for this and knew that this was coming. So did a lot of counties and so did a lot of hospitals. You know, this is something that does require coordination across all levels of government. And certainly, the highest levels of government do bear greater responsibility. But again, like this is something that we knew was going to be coming for bear greater responsibility. But again, like this is something

that we knew was going to be coming for a long time. And unfortunately, the fact that the U.S. has been doing such a poor job of it shows that there was some level of institutional failure, particularly if you compare the U.S. to other countries, which are seeing a much higher rate of vaccine distribution. It shows that this can be done right. It's just that for whatever reason, we're not doing a good job of it. It seems like, you know, just merely a few weeks ago where we had you and Dr. Fauci himself on our live show, and it was the week where the United States had just started administering the vaccine, but it was also the week we hit, you know, 300,000 deaths. So it didn't seem like we were in the clear at all, but there was good news.

Has that feeling of being a little bit further along been set back now by the fact that we have this new strain that's more contagious and these really disappointing numbers on vaccinations in the United States? Well, the thing to remember is, you know, even with this new strain, the existing strains of COVID-19 are the ones that have been causing the most devastation so far. So the conventional ones that we've been dealing with are the ones that have led to more than 300,000 deaths in the United States. And so those are already quite dangerous, and we've already done a very poor job of controlling them. But you're right that the vaccine does offer us hope and a path out. But, of course, it needs all these other things to fall into place as well. It needs good administration. It needs good logistics.

It needs people to actually get vaccinated. You know, there's still a lot of vaccine hesitancy and people who are still turning down vaccines. So all these parts have to be working together. When one part of that complicated machine fails, you know, a lot of it can easily get derailed. And we can have a lot of setbacks in our progress towards getting out of this pandemic. And the longer it takes us to get out of this pandemic,

the more mutations we're going to see. That's right. I mean, one of the best things we can do to limit mutations is to limit the number of people infected. The more people that are infected, the more cases develop, the more likely it is that the virus will change in a way that could escape protection from a vaccine. The best way we can guarantee our health in the near term is to control the spread of the virus. And it's also the best way to ensure that the vaccine remains as protective and viable for as long as possible. Umair Irfan reports mostly on the vaccine these days at Vox.com, where you can find lots of reporting from our science team on these mutations. I'm Sean Ramos-Firm. It's Today Explained.

The team includes Will Reed, Muj Zaydi, Amna Alsadi, Halima Shah, Noam Hassenfeld, and our engineers, Afim Shapiro. Our supervising producer is Golda Arthur. Music comes from Breakmaster Cylinder. Facts are checked by Cecilia Lay. Liz Kelly Nelson is Vox's editorial director of podcasts and today Explained is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Thank you.