Mutated virus

 You know when a few states were ending their lockdowns or stay-at-home or shelter-in-place orders to mitigate the spread of coronavirus or COVID-19 - remember to flatten the curve which should've taken two weeks and instead kept getting extended. Anyway what was my point.

Well ending the lockdowns in places like Chicago and others bled into the unrest over the death of George Floyd. I was dismayed at the riots and looting and it became clear to me by my own eyes that perhaps authorities tried to keep people at home for too long. And I would think as the weather gets warmer people would start to get restless.

And then I consider the economic damage. There are a few businesses suffering damage to their businesses both big and small. And some were affected by ongoing unrest - and no not all of those businesses save the larger ones have insurance. Indeed you may have lost a lot of product or equipment to looting, however, insurance may not compensate for all losses.

And now I hear there is a mutated version of this virus. Something else to get the public worked up over. In Great Britain they're locking down again because of it. They wanted to get back to normal for Christmas, nope we can't go forward says Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

What is this mutation we're talking about:

On 8 December, during a regular Tuesday meeting about the spread of the pandemic coronavirus in the United Kingdom, scientists and public health experts saw a diagram that made them sit up straight. Kent, in southeastern England, was experiencing a surge in cases, and a phylogenetic tree showing viral sequences from the county looked very strange, says Nick Loman, a microbial genomicist at the University of Birmingham. Not only were half the cases caused by one specific variant of SARS-CoV-2, but that variant was sitting on a branch of the tree that literally stuck out from the rest of the data. “I’ve not seen a part of the tree that looks like this before,” Loman says.

Less than 2 weeks later, that variant is causing mayhem in the United Kingdom and elsewhere in Europe. Yesterday, U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced stricter lockdown measures, saying the strain, which goes by the name B.1.1.7, appears to be better at spreading between people. The news led many Londoners to leave the city today, before the new rules take effect, causing overcrowded railway stations. The Netherlands, Belgium, and Italy announced they were temporarily halting passenger flights from the United Kingdom. The Eurostar train between Brussels and London will stop running tonight at midnight, for at least 24 hours.

Scientists, meanwhile, are hard at work trying to figure out whether B.1.1.7 is really more adept at human-to-human transmission—not everyone is convinced yet—and if so, why. They’re also wondering how it evolved so fast. B.1.1.7 has acquired 17 mutations all at once, a feat never seen before. “There’s now a frantic push to try and characterize some of these mutations in the lab,” says Andrew Rambaut, a molecular evolutionary biologist at the University of Edinburgh.

And now some of these same Governors who locked down their states especially Gov. Cuomo (D-NY) are looking into this and sounding the alarm. Like I said another thing to get the public worked up over although let's not fret too much New York restaurants have banned Cuomo for life ha!

It seems we may have another crisis, but I very much hope I'm wrong on this. Hopefully this vaccine will help bring things back to some semblance of normal as I had been hoping for most of this year. I hoped only to see this thing come back with a vengeance!