Coronavirus | New strain would have spread in Europe since November – Health

The new variant of the coronavirus detected in the United Kingdom could be infecting citizens of several European countries for a few weeks, as declared this Sunday by the professor of pharmaco-epidemiology at the British University of Oxford, Daniel Prieto Alhambra.

About twenty million people have been confined since this Sunday in London and its metropolitan area due to the increase in infections of covid-19, apparently due to the mutation of the virus, which the United Kingdom has communicated to the World Health Organization (WHO ).

In an interview for Spanish radio, Prieto Alhambra explained that for a month there was already talk in the scientific field of a possible mutation of the virus, which would now be more contagious change that would have been detected in several European countries. He clarified that it is still too early to point out if this mutation is the cause of the sudden increase in cases in London, Germany, Italy or Spain, although he specified that it is almost certain that it is already present in several European countries.

(Also read: Alarm in Europe: new strain accelerates covid transmission by 70%)

Prieto Alhambra, also a member of the expert council that advises the European Medicines Agency on vaccines against the virus, explained that The first indications are that the change has occurred in the virus’s protein S, which allows it to latch on better and, consequently, be more contagious.

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If confirmed, one of the consequences, according to Pérez Alhambra, is that it would be necessary to vaccinate more people than expected now to achieve the so-called “herd immunity.” On the contrary, if there are already more people infected but asymptomatic than what studies now indicate, “vaccines would be wasting” with people already infected. One predicted that, in any case, it will not be possible to speak that the pandemic begins to be controlled until within half a year and called for all people to be vaccinated. “It is safer to get immunity by getting vaccinated than by getting infected,” he argued.