vivweb01blog

I last published in April on the whys and wherefores of our ‘broken’ immigration system .  By that stage the government had realised that 'Stopping the Boats' was a make or break problem for them, and was just starting to get focused on more active deterrence measures. The PM is now sporting it as one of his 5 principal objectives. However, since then their increasingly fraught campaign has, perhaps predictably, come up against many obstacles and delays, mainly due to unwelcome human intervention. As the Bard might have put it, “..One barge-load does not a solution bring….”, particularly if the new 'clients' are disembarked within a week of taking up residence because of 'health concerns'.  In the absence of either of our major political parties coming up with any really effective solution, and to avoid becoming even more of a laughing stock for the people smugglers, we should perhaps consider some more off the wall suggestions. One of the more inventive one...

  As predicted, SARS-CoV-2 hasn’t finished with us yet…. After a lull in the flow of ‘Variants if Concern’, we now have another Delta to Omicron-style evolutionary jump in the form of BA.2.86. The main concern with this particular variant is that it has lots of spike protein amino-acid mutations. First, just how different is it to past and present variants ? Relative to Omicron BA.2 (its putative ancestor) the BA.2.86 Spike Protein has 34 mutations: 29 substitutions, 4 deletions, 1 insertion. Relative to Omicron XBB.1.5 (more recent strain recommended for vaccine development) it has 36 mutations: 32 substitutions, 3 deletions, 1 insertion. Relative to the early Wuhan-Hu-1, it has a whopping 58 mutations: 52 substitutions, 5 deletions, 1 insertion. The key point here is that the number of spike amino acid mutations in the BA.2.86 variant relative to BA.2 and XBB.1.5 is comparable to the number of mutations in first Omicron strains relative to Wuhan-Hu-1. Although it’s e...