Originally Posted by
skybluesea
Please excuse if this should be posted elsewhere.
BC Center for Disease Control just reported that UK variant confirmed on Vancouver Island, and that the two travelers followed all quarantine requirements but did NOT experience symptoms until afterwards.
Because of new variant, Hong Kong announced yesterday 21 day quarantine for all arrivals (see my post on HKG thread).
Will Canada now announce 21 day quarantine to get ahead of the new variant and the delayed gestation of symptoms?
Do you have a link to the details on the two traveler story? I have seen press coverage of other BC and wider Canada cases of the more transmissible variant but not this two traveler case you mention.
THE UK's PHE released the attached today which gives some early comparative analysis working back from PCR datasets:
https://assets.publishing.service.go...ng_2_FINAL.pdf
It doesn't talk to incubation though.
In very broad terms, my working assumption (and from what I've read so far), for the 'new' spike efficiency development of the virus, was that the 'new' virus would be more transmissible by loading-up faster. It then followed that development of symptoms could be faster and with potentially fewer asymptomatics. Bizarrely, I'd been following daily datasets from Western Cape, ZA and a couple of South East UK authorities before the news on N501Y; and couldn't satisfactorily account for the relatively rapid upticks in cases set against local knowledge.
The current explanation of a broadly 50% higher transmissibility (on the UK one) makes a deal of sense set against the daily infection case data; that would assume the 'normal' 4 to 6 days delay. So back-fitting the storylines and material around the new strains to my previous observations adds up.
I haven't seen anything (prior to the above post) implying or evidencing a symptom development delay. I was already slightly curious over what drove the Hong Kong switch to 21 days; specifically was that based on some evidence or was it mainly about risk-aversion?
But, for now at least, looking to follow through on any emerging evidence .... especially any pointing to a longer incubation curve or indicator of "delayed gestation" in these new variants.