New strain of coronavirus: what does it mean to you?

England’s chief medical officer Chris Whitty said on Saturday that the new strain “may spread more quickly” and is responsible for 60% of new infections in London.

On Monday, an epidemiologist with the World Health Organization said: “We heard that it could spread up to 70% faster.”

“What you are seeing is that the breeding number, so this is the number of individuals to whom an infected person is transmitted, has increased from 1.1 to 1.5,” said Maria Van Kerkhove, technical leader of WHO for Covid-19.

“I just want to put this increase of up to 70% into context.”

Van Kerkhove said it is not yet clear if that increase “is associated with the variant itself” or if it is due to human behavior.

So far, “there is no evidence that this variant causes more serious illness or increased risk of death,” the CDC said Tuesday.

But a strain that spreads faster could lead to more infections, which in turn could lead to more hospitalizations and deaths.

Where is this strain now?

As of Tuesday, the strain “has not been identified through sequencing efforts in the United States, although viruses have only been sequenced from about 51,000 of the 17 million American cases,” the CDC said.

“Given the small fraction of US infections that have been sequenced, the variant could already be in the United States without being detected.”

Public Health England said that backtracking (using genetic evidence) suggests the strain first emerged in England in September. It then circulated at very low levels until mid-November.

“Because this virus has been circulating for some time in the UK, the cat is out of the bag,” Gounder said. “It has spread to other places, including the United States.”

Who is most infected with this strain?

“Most of the COVID-19 cases in which this variant has been identified have occurred in people under the age of 60,” the World Health Organization said Tuesday.

That can be problematic because “when people are asymptomatic, they are generally under the age of 60,” said CNN senior medical correspondent Elizabeth Cohen.

“So that may be the reason that this is spreading so rapidly, or part of the reason, is that a lot of these people show no symptoms, so they run and spread it.”

While severe illness from Covid-19 is relatively rare in children, “there is an indication that [the new strain] … has a higher propensity to infect children, “said scientist Neil Ferguson, a member of the UK New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threat Advisory Group (NERVTAG),

But he said more data is needed.

How do I protect myself from this new strain?

This new strain means that “we have to do a little more work to prevent the spread,” Van Kerkhove said.

Gounder agreed. “What we really have to do is focus on the things that we know will prevent the spread of this new variant, which is the same thing that works against the spread of the coronavirus in general,” he said.

“That’s masks, social distancing.”

Will vaccines work against this new strain?

Both the Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine and the Moderna vaccine have shown efficacy rates of around 95% in clinical trials. But now many are wondering whether the vaccines would work on variant strains of the virus, such as the one spreading rapidly in the UK.

Pfizer and Moderna said they are testing their vaccines to see if they work against the UK strain.

“On the subject of herd immunity, you always talk about 60% to 70%,” Sahin said.

“But if the virus becomes more efficient at infecting people, we may even need a high vaccination rate to ensure that normal life can continue without interruption.”

The new coronavirus has mutated before and both vaccines have worked against variations of the virus.

“So far, I don’t think there has been a single variant that is resistant to the vaccine,” Moncef Slaoui, Operation Warp Speed’s chief scientific adviser, said Sunday.

“We cannot exclude it, but it is not there now.”

How does this strain impact travel?

There are no plans so far for the United States to enact a travel ban against the United Kingdom, US Assistant Secretary for Health Admiral Brett Giroir said Monday.

British Airways, Delta Airlines and Virgin Atlantic have agreed to require passengers to be tested for Covid-19 before boarding planes from the UK to New York, Governor Andrew Cuomo said.

“This is not really the time to travel,” Gounder said.