The new variant was clearly known about some days before yesterday's announcement
But....surely the key issue was not whether there was a new variant (viruses change all the time - we need our resident expert Beth on this), but whether there was sufficient evidence to change existing expert advice / policy
A new variant wouldn't automatically mean it would be more dangerous (new strain of flu hits us every year) and therefore might not change existing advice
The debate as I see it is more around should there have been an Xmas relaxation in the first place, new variant or not
Storford I am not an expert on this ...my field is diagnostic testing (and I said the lateral flow test was a load of poo and I was right.)
I have been thinking about this for a while....and these are my musings, a bit scientific but, there is a lot I do not get.
There are now 27 strains (now what they mean are 27 different variants of the virus that are different enough to say they are different strains...no I do not know what is meant by "significantly different enough")
One of them is now called a "new strain"...no I do not know what the others are called.
It is obviously picked up by the testing regime (obviously not the lateral flow test, as that is just a little man who flicks a coin...and a load of @@@@). If what we are told yesterday is true we can say that as we know it is contibuting to the upsurge in numbers. Now to me this is good, as it probably means it is similar enough to be controlled by the vaccine....THATS THE GOOD BIT.
But if it is picked up by testing system ...how do we know that it is on the upswing...and it is not just the old strain that is on the up.. We don't unless we sequence the areas of virus that have changed and compare. That is a fairly big thing to do, and cannot be done for the population, it is done in dedicated labs on small sample numbers. So we do not know.
Matt Hancock yesterday was talking through his hat (again). I am not saying that he will be shown to be definately wrong....but in my opinion, they were using the "new strain" as a convenient excuse to make a U-turn. The reason they had to do this was that there was a big upsurge in cases, because the measures they took in November were insufficient, and Dedcember would be worse.
The new variant, which as yet has not been proved to be any worse than the "old" one, has not been proved to be the reason for the upsurge either.
London and the SE should have gone into Tier 3 when Liverpool did...then old, new and the other 25 viral cousins would not have spread.
By the way...I am greatly pissed off too, we have the bestest family Christmases...and with a 2 year old it would have been magical.