Tony's Diary Package — page 1066

A variant wave is likely to start in at most 3 months The BA.2.75 sublineage BA.2.75.2 (S:346T, S:486S, S:1119N) currently doubles in share every week (+80120%). It made up between 0.1 and 0.5% in samples from two weeks ago in Europe (in Asia, North America and Oceania, the share is higher at between 0.5-5%). • Global Cov-Spectrum query • Europe Cov-Spectrum query If this growth trend continues, this variant will dominate in about two months. At this point, the growth advantage would manifest in increased overall growth in incidence and a variant wave would start around November - on top of the expected seasonal acceleration of transmission. The growth advantage over resident BA.2 or BA.5 lineages is of the same order of magnitude as was the case when BA.5 displaced BA.2, which was sufficient to cause a summer wave. Currently, BA.2.75.2 is the fastest growing lineage with more than 350 sequences available. The rest of this report will focus on other lineages that may end up growing faster than BA.2.75. PRESS: Canada TV "The Agenda" with Steve Paikin; NPR "The World" with Marco Werman;Podcast with Steve Morrison at CSIS; MiddleEast Broadcast Interview (TV); Rural Health Matters TV with Dr. Jeffrey Gold; Sept. 20, 2020 • Typical media distortions. Vivek Murthy was on MSNBC with Morning Joe and they showed a clip of POTUS saying that the pandemic was "over" and then they showed immediately after a short clip of "part" of my interview with Steve Morrison in a CSIS podcast of my saying: FAUCI [clip]: "we are not where we need to be if we're going to be able to quote live with the virus because we know we're not going to eradicate it. we only did that with one virus, which is smallpox, and that was very different. because smallpox doesn't change from year to year or decade to decade or even from century to century." As expected this created somewhat of a disturbance with the meme being pitting me against the president of the United states. Rather typical press nonsense. The POTUS is getting pushback and criticism in that he has inadvertently undermined out attempts to get more money from the Congress for COVID since the GOP will now quote him as saying the pandemic is "Over". I have been out there explaining that the POTUS meant that the "fulminant" nature of COVID when we were getting 3 to 4000 deaths per day is now behind us, whereas now even though we are at an acceptably high level of three to 400 deaths per day, it is still much better than it was many months ago. It is as good an explanation as