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Boris Johnson explained that the British “new variant” of the Coronavirus is the reason for the latest restrictions announced yesterday. Decembre 19th, in London and the south-east of England. The Netherlands, in an attempt to limit cases of imports from abroad, cut air connections with the United Kingdom. And the WHO has made it known that it is in close contact with the British authorities to study the new variant. But what exactly is it about? And what impact could it have on the vaccination campaign now looming across Europe?
As reported by the British newspaper The Guardian, the mutation of a virus in itself is not an anomalous event. Viruses are constantly changing, and most of the new variants go extinct. Sometimes they spread without affecting the behavior of the virus. In rare cases, they cause dramatic changes. The question now being posed to scientists is which category will fall into the VUI-202012/01 variant, the existence of which was already announced in early December by Health Secretary Matt Hancock.
British scientists’ analyzes
Yesterday, the government’s chief physician, Chris Whitty, said: “As a result of the rapid implementation of the new variant, preliminary model data, and rapidly increasing incidence rates in the Southeast, the Respiratory Virus Threat Advisory Group New and Emerging (Nervtag) believes the new strain could spread faster. We have alerted the World Health Organization and we continue to analyze the available data.
The analyzes of the new variant will involve scientists who grow the new strain in laboratories, study its antibody responses and test its cross-reactions with Covid-19 vaccines. In addition, British health officials are now randomly sequencing samples of positive cases across the country to detect their spread across the country and build regional maps of their prevalence. This step will take at least two weeks.
Previous virus mutations
The appearance of the new variant, reports the guardianIt is alarming, although it should be noted that there have been other Covid-19 mutations in the past. Last month, the Danish government euthanized millions of minks after it emerged that hundreds of Covid-19 cases were associated with Sars-CoV-2 variants carried by farm mink. And in October, analyzes suggested a variant of the coronavirus that originated in Spanish agricultural workers and quickly spread to Europe and accounted for the majority of cases in the UK.
In neither of these two cases were the variants found to increase disease transmission. However, this does not apply to the VUI-202012/01 variant, which according to Johnson has a much higher transmissibility, quantified at 70% more. What scientists must now address are concerns about the impact of the new variant: Will it lead to an increase in cases of severe disease? And most importantly, will you be able to circumvent the protection offered by Covid-19 vaccines?
“The impact in severe cases will be modest”
“If the new variant had a major impact on the severity of the disease, we would have already seen it,” said Ewan Birney, deputy director general of the European Laboratory for Molecular Biology and deputy director of its European Institute of Bioinformatics in Cambridge. “The percentage of hospital cases in relation to the number of infections would have been drastically reduced or decreased. It hasn’t happened either, so we can conclude that the impact on the number of severe cases is likely to be modest. “As for vaccines, Birney said approved formulas are tested with many variants of the virus in circulation.” So there are many reasons to think that vaccines will continue to work against this new strain, even if it obviously needs to be thoroughly tested. “
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