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WWhat else? What is still supposed to happen? After the panic and chatter reactions to the mutant virus VUI-202012/01, you must ask yourself the question that the world finds a healthy balance between extremes. Hysteria doesn’t help anyone, but minimizing it is even less effective. Least of all the most vulnerable. Danger didn’t just hit the world with the new variant. And the danger has not passed, because governments react with flight bans and border closures.
Based on all that is available in terms of epidemiological data, the coronavirus mutant, which was first detected in the south of England, has been circulating for months. It’s only now been noticed because Britain, unlike most other countries, including Germany, has established an effective network for the genetic registration of Sars-CoV-2 isolates from patient samples. If you don’t look, you won’t find anything, this lesson will make sense to everyone after long discussions about virus testing and the number of cases. That would be a good approach for a “coordinated European” response. The information that this research network has provided about the mutant so far is quite a lot, but still very little and generally uncertain. There is “moderate confidence” in their own assessment, this is how the scientists reported their earlier findings to the British government, which has created its own task force and reported to the World Health Organization.
These more than a dozen changes could have systemic relevance
But what does that mean: moderate confidence? The results available to date are said to be incomplete and the data required for a final safety assessment is still lacking. One thing is clear: a mutant with many different mutations, of all things in the spike protein that is crucial for infection, is unusual and must also be taken seriously. In other words, these more than a dozen changes could have systemic relevance. In some experiments these changes have already shown that growth in cell culture increases and therefore the multiplication of the virus. The mutant apparently multiplies faster in the artificial system of a laboratory and produces more virus particles. At the same time, the mutant also contains “debilitating” traits that could affect the virus’s ability to bind to human cells.
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Either they actually do or if, on the other hand, the reinforcing properties are responsible for the fact that this variant has actually been displacing and spreading the other variants in southern England for a few weeks; none of this can be derived with certainty from the available data. The research work of the next days and weeks will have to prove it. There is also a lack of clarity regarding the current situation: the observation that the virus is prevalent in an already strong infection process in London, on the one hand, makes virologists questionable. On the other hand, the virus appears to have been around for months and no one had noticed a sudden change, not even British researchers of the Covid-19 genome.
Two things seem clear: there is no evidence, not even biological or clinical, that this variant is responsible for more serious disease courses. And it is very likely that the mutations will not affect the efficacy of vaccines, even if the mutations are in sensitive areas of the virus plane. The human immune system is multi-skilled – the vaccine just provides the impetus for the body to produce all kinds of antibodies and immune cells that attack very different parts of the virus.
Therefore, assuming a dangerous “new” virus is misleading. It is linguistically and novelty-minded, but also psychologically counterproductive: with the idea that the European approach must now turn to the new variant to avoid the greatest danger, the fight against the pandemic could even be a List. The fear tolerance of many people is now a scarce resource, and while vaccines are not available in sufficient quantities, this also applies to the tools we have to contain viruses.
If you don’t want to risk tiredness and mistrust further eroding this limited arsenal, there is only one thing you might be interested in: reducing the number of infections to a level that prevents the virus from spreading uncontrollably in the coming months. Only this measure, together with a functional monitoring of the infection process, seriously protects against dangerous mutants: if the number of viruses is radically limited, the pathogen has fewer opportunities to form new and unpredictable variants.
