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The new variant was discovered last week by scientists at the African Center of Excellence for Genomics of Infectious Diseases (ACEGID) in southeastern Nigeria.
ABUJA – A researcher who identified a new variant of the coronavirus in Nigeria cautioned against automatic assumptions that it poses similar risks to variants that have emerged elsewhere.
The new variant was discovered last week by scientists at the African Center of Excellence for Genomics of Infectious Diseases (ACEGID) in southeastern Nigeria.
ACEGID Director Christian Happi said the variant was found in two of 200 virus samples collected from patients between Aug.3 and Oct.9.
The two samples were taken from the same state of Nigeria at different times.
They show a variant “different from what has been circulating in Nigeria, different from South Africa and different from the UK,” he said in an interview with AFP.
Britain tightened restrictions after finding a new variant there that it said was more contagious than the initial forms of the virus.
South Africa says that a new variant detected there could explain the rapid spread of a second wave that has hit the very young in particular.
Happi stressed that scientists were racing to unlock knowledge about the Nigerian variant and urged people not to “extrapolate.”
“We have no idea, there is no evidence to say that this variant is related to the peak that we are seeing in Nigeria or not,” Happi said, explaining that samples from the latest cases were being analyzed to get an answer.
Nigeria has recorded more than 82,000 COVID-19 cases, of which 1,246 were fatal.
Compared to the country’s population of about 200 million people, this number is small.
However, the case count has increased by several hundred a day since the beginning of December. There has been a significant increase in Lagos, Nigeria’s economic capital, prompting the authorities to reinstate the curfew and gatherings of more than 50 people.
But the number of deaths in Nigeria has not seen a commensurate increase.
VIRUS MUTATION
Happi, a Harvard-trained and Cameroonian-raised professor of molecular biology, works in a state-of-the-art laboratory in Ede, southeastern Nigeria.
It is one of only 12 in Africa designed to sequence the viral genetic code and track mutations – telltale changes that can be used to build a family tree for the microbe.
From this, the Ede scientists believe that the variant evolved “within Nigeria, I don’t think it was imported from anywhere,” Happi said.
“When changes occur, what matters most, what we are focusing on, is the spike protein,” he said, referring to the spike-shaped protein by which the coronavirus attaches itself to a cell and infects it.
Happi said there was a “tendency to extrapolate” after such a discovery.
But he strongly cautioned against the automatic assumption that what happened in a population setting would also happen elsewhere.
AFRICAN DIFFERENCE?
“Many of the models drawn at the beginning of the pandemic were wrong,” he said.
“By now they were saying that a third of the African population would be dead. So people need to think,” he said.
“It is very wrong to assume models based on knowledge that are not precise or on assumptions that depend on data obtained from Europe or the United States and transfer them to a continent like Africa: we are genetically different, we are immunologically different.”
All of Africa has recorded 2.4 million cases, according to an AFP count, just 3.6% of the global count, though testing is also much less widespread. The continent’s death toll of 57,000 is less than a fifth that of the United States.
John Nkengasong, director of the African Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the African Union health agency, also asked for patience as scientists worked to understand the Nigerian variant.
“Give us a little time,” he said in a video conference from Addis Ababa. “It’s still very early.”
Nkengasong appealed to Africans not to let their guard down, warning of the danger of a second wave of infection.
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