South African variant of coronavirus is ‘more troublesome’ than UK’s

A variant of the coronavirus identified in South Africa is more problematic than the strain found in the UK, the British health minister said, as both strains continue to spread rapidly.

Speaking to the BBC on Monday, Health Secretary Matt Hancock said the variant found in South Africa was especially concerning.

“I am incredibly concerned about the South African variant, and that is why we took the steps we did to restrict all flights from South Africa,” he told the BBC’s Today program.

“This is a very, very important problem … and even more so than the new UK variant.”

Both the UK and South Africa are struggling with an increase in Covid-19 infections, which have been attributed in large part to new mutations in the virus that make it more transmittable.

The new UK variant was first identified in Kent, south-east England, in December. UK authorities alerted the World Health Organization to its appearance.

Experts note that while the new variant makes the virus spread more easily, it doesn’t appear to make it more deadly. However, UK hospitals are under pressure from a dramatic increase in infections and admissions.

Questions have been raised about how the coronavirus vaccines will work against the new variants.

Several experts have said they hope that vaccines, such as those from Pfizer and BioNTech, and the University of Oxford / AstraZeneca, will protect against the new strains.

In early December, WHO chief scientist Soumya Swaminathan tried to allay fears about the variants, telling the BBC that it was “highly unlikely” that the latest mutations would make current vaccines not work. The WHO has said that more research is required “to understand the impact of specific mutations on viral properties and the efficacy of diagnostics, therapeutics and vaccines.”

However, Oxford University Professor Regius of Medicine John Bell said on Sunday that the variant identified in South Africa was concerning in this regard.

“They both have multiple and different mutations, so they are not a single mutation,” he told Times Radio. “And the mutations associated with the South African form are really quite substantial changes in the structure of the protein (virus peak).”

He said there were questions about whether the Pfizer / BioNTech and the University of Oxford / AstraZeneca vaccines would be “inactivated” in the presence of such mutations.

The team behind the Oxford University jab was investigating the effect of the variants in their vaccine, he said, adding that their intuition was that it would still be effective against the strain identified in the UK, but was not more sure about the one identified. In South Africa.

However, he told the radio station that if the vaccine did not work in this variant, it was likely that the vaccines could be adapted and that would not take as long as a year.

Coronavirus vaccines are the only bright spot in a pandemic that continues to wreak havoc in the West. On Monday, the UK began its launch of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine after starting to roll out the Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine in December.

Meanwhile, restrictions on public life continue and UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson has hinted that further restrictions could be introduced in England. Many parts of the country are already effectively under lockdown, with all but essential stores closed and people being told to stay home as much as possible. Still, more restrictions could be introduced in some parts of the country with more relaxed measures.

The UK has recorded more than 2.6 million cases of the virus and more than 75,000 deaths to date, according to a tally by Johns Hopkins University, and the new variant of the virus has led to an increase in infections in London and the southeast and is beginning to appear in other parts of the country.

In South Africa, more than 1.1 million cases and nearly 30,000 deaths have been recorded and the new strain has become dominant in the Western Cape, Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal.

The variant originally identified in the UK has also been discovered in some European countries and the US, leading many nations to ban flights from the UK. For its part, the UK has banned visitors from South Africa.