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A severe variant of coronavirus has been detected in South Africa that could explain the rapid spread of a second wave affecting the very young, the Health Minister said today.
Known as the 501.V2 variant, it was identified by South African researchers and details have been sent to the World Health Organization, Zwelini Mkhize said in a statement.
A team led by the Kwazulu-Natal Research Innovation and Sequencing Platform (KRISP) has sequenced hundreds of virus samples since the pandemic began.
Mkhize said he “noticed that one particular variant has increasingly dominated the findings from samples collected in the last two months.”
South African doctors have pointed out that more patients are younger and do not always have other conditions that amplify the effect of the virus, but they do suffer from more severe forms of Covid-19 nonetheless.
That “strongly suggests that the current second wave we are experiencing is being driven by this new variant,” concluded Mr Mkhize.
The research team, led by Tulio de Oliveira, has shared its findings with the scientific community and has alerted the British authorities, who have “studied their own samples and discovered that a similar mutation … was the variant that It was fueling their revival in London, “he said.
Variants of the coronavirus have been regularly identified and brought to the attention of world health officials.
The World Health Organization (WHO) said today that it was in contact with South African researchers who identified the new variant.
The world body said there was no indication that there were changes in the way the new strain of the virus behaved.
“We are working with them with our working group on the evolution of the SARS-COV-2 virus,” WHO epidemiologist Maria Van Kerkhove told a news conference in Geneva.
“They are growing the virus in the country and are working with researchers to determine any changes in the behavior of the virus itself in terms of transmission.”
South Africa has been more affected by the coronavirus than other countries on the continent, and to date it had registered 24,845 deaths and more than 900,000 cases in a population of almost 60 million people.
More than 8,700 cases were detected there in the previous 24 hours, still well below the peak of around 12,000 per day seen in July.
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Meanwhile, The Telegraph newspaper reports that British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has summoned senior ministers to an unscheduled meeting tonight to discuss how to contain the most virulent new variant of the coronavirus in the UK.
An emergency tightening of Covid-19 restrictions could be announced as early as tomorrow, the newspaper said. A Johnson spokesman said he could not immediately comment on the report.
The Telegraph also reported that UK officials expected the AstraZeneca-Oxford University Covid vaccine to gain regulatory approval on December 28 or 29, which would help speed up the vaccination campaign in Britain.
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