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Virologist Pedro Simas said on Friday that the appearance of new strains “does not have the impact of causing greater disease,” after the first case of covid-19 associated with the South African genetic variant was identified in Portugal.
Speaking to Lusa, the virologist from the Lisbon Institute of Molecular Medicine explained that new variants are always emerging since the beginning of the pandemic.
“Variants are always appearing and the predominant variants, in relation to the others, are the ones that have the greatest diffusion advantage, more diffusion capacity,” he said, adding that it is a “natural process.
According to the virologist, the new variants must be monitored and not generate panic in society, because it is part of the process of replication and evolution of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
“[As variantes] They have no impact on causing major illness. From an evolutionary point of view, it does not make sense, because if it did not have such a rapid diffusion capacity, they would be easily identified in clinical terms and isolated people without the possibility of diffusing them ”, he emphasized.
For Pedro Simas, the variants should not be used to try to justify failures in the containment of community spread, nor to “try to instill a feeling of insecurity in people in relation to vaccines.”
“If a variant like the one in the United Kingdom that has a greater spread advantage in a certain geographical area is natural for it to spread, because it dominates in relation to the others, this does not mean that it has properties to cause major diseases, they necessarily impact on the effectiveness of the vaccine, “he said.
Showing concern, but not scaremongering, the virologist said vaccines will be changed if a strain with “significant impact” appears.
“It is not a case that we cannot solve or resolve,” he concluded.
The first case of covid-19 associated with the genetic variant in South Africa was identified today in Portugal by the Ricardo Jorge National Institute of Health (INSA), the institution informed Lusa.
The case identified in Portugal, through genomic sequencing, has already been denounced by the INSA to the health authorities, who are already “taking the necessary steps to quickly trace the contacts and interrupt the potential chain of transmission,” said INSA.
According to South African scientists, the data collected so far has not shown that the new variant of SARS-CoV-2 detected in South Africa, dubbed 501Y.V2, does not accompany an increased morbidity rate, although the increased health pressure it may be behind more deaths.
INSA has been developing since April 2020, in conjunction with the Gulbenkian Institute of Sciences and with the collaboration of more than 65 laboratories, hospitals and institutions throughout the country, a study that aims to determine the mutational profiles of SARS-CoV-2 for the identification and monitoring of the transmission chains of the new coronavirus, as well as the identification of new virus introductions in Portugal.
Portugal today registered the highest number of deaths (234) from covid-19 since the beginning of the pandemic and 13,987 new cases of infection, according to the daily balance of the DGS.
In Portugal, 9,920 people have already died of the 609,136 confirmed cases of infection.
Covid-19 is a respiratory disease caused by a new coronavirus (type of virus) detected in late December 2019 in Wuhan, a city in central China, which has spread rapidly across the world.
The number of deaths in Portugal during 2020 was 10.6% higher than the average of the previous five years, the National Institute of Statistics published today, which registered 123,409 deaths, 12,220 more than between 2015 and 2019.
As of December 31, there were 6,906 deaths attributed to covid-19, that is, 56% of the excess mortality in 2020 in relation to the 2015-2019 average.
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