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The highly infectious mutant strain of coronavirus found in Kent may be more likely to affect children, the scientists warned.
Modelers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine found that the new strain of the virus is 56% more infectious.
Even if another national lockdown were implemented, it would be ‘unlikely’ to lower the R below one unless schools and universities were also closed, their study found.
But researchers don’t think the new strain is more deadly or cause more serious illness in adults or children.
The researchers said there is “some evidence that the increase may be particularly marked in children.”
The new variant will lead to a wave of coronavirus cases and deaths that will peak in the spring of 2021 in London, the southeast and east of England, they said.
They said cases and deaths will peak in the summer of 2021 for the rest of the country.
Schools were due to return on January 4, but Education Secretary Gavin Williamson ordered a week of testing and most students will return on January 11.
Only GCSE and A-level students, vulnerable children, and children of critical workers will return on time.
The coronavirus is most rampant among high school students, according to separate figures from the Office for National Statistics.
Those in Year 7 to Year 11 are seeing the highest rates of infection among the entire population.
Scientists hope to learn much more in the next two weeks about how quickly the variant spreads among children, said Professor Neil Ferguson, an epidemiologist at Imperial College London and a member of the NERVTAG advisory group for No. 10.
Children throughout the coronavirus pandemic have accounted for far fewer cases than from other respiratory illnesses, including the flu.
The main theory for this is due to how the coronavirus enters human cells, through a receptor called ACE2 that is found in many cells of the upper respiratory tract.
As a result, NERVTAG fellow Professor Wendy Barclay of Imperial College London explained that this made adults “easy targets” compared to children.
This is because the amount of ACE2 that a person expresses naturally and steadily increases over time, and young children have very little.
“I think that when it comes to children, we should be careful what we say. We are not saying that this is a virus that specifically attacks children or that it is more specific in its ability to infect children, ”he said.
“But we know that SARS-CoV-2, as it emerged as a virus, was not as effective in infecting children as it was in adults.
‘The older virus had a harder time binding to ACE2 and entering cells and therefore adults, who have a lot of ACE2 in their nose and throat, were easy targets and children were difficult to infect.
“It’s easier for the newer virus to do that, and so children are just as susceptible, perhaps, to this virus as adults.
Given their mixing patterns, it is to be expected that more children will be infected.
“It is not because the virus is specifically targeting children, it is now less inhibited.”
Professor Ferguson added that if this hypothesis is found to be true, it could explain a “significant proportion” of the increase in transmission.
At a virtual press conference hosted by the Science Media Center, he said: ‘There is an indication that it has a higher propensity to infect children.
“That might explain some of the differences, but we haven’t established any kind of causality.”
The new strain of the virus, which experts fear is more contagious, prompted more than 50 countries to impose travel restrictions on the UK, where it first emerged.
But cases of the new variant have still been reported around the world: Japan confirmed five infections in UK passengers on Friday, while cases have also been reported in Denmark, Lebanon, Germany, Australia and the Netherlands.
South Africa has detected a similar mutation in some infected people, but on Friday denied British claims that its strain was more infectious or dangerous than the one native to the United Kingdom.
