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Scientists tracking the spread of COVID variants have warned against lifting the blockade too soon.
They warn that easing restrictions before daily cases are in the “few thousand” could allow more sinister versions of the virus to escape and sow a new outbreak.
In an exclusive interview, Steve Paterson, a professor of genetics at the University of Liverpool, told Sky News: “The virus doesn’t care that we want to meet our friends. It’s going to find new ways to transmit or evade immunity.”
Professor Paterson said the virus ‘has always been weaponized by mutation and evolution’
“In order for public health and genome sequencing to have a chance to determine where the virus is mutating and where new variants are starting to spread, we really need that leeway to reduce cases before we can take our foot off the brake.
“That has to be a minimum of thousands a day.
“Otherwise, we will end up with cases on the rise again, in a place we don’t want to be.”
The seven-day moving average of positive cases is currently around 12,000.
Professor Paterson’s laboratory is part of COG-UK, a consortium of laboratories that tracks the emergence of new variants.
He said the Joint Center for Biosafety is closely monitoring the outbreak in Bristol, where the more transmissible Kent variant has again evolved, adding the same mutation that helps the South African version of the virus evade the immune system.
There are more than 20 cases so far and augmentation tests are underway to try to identify anyone with the virus.
“A lot of resources are being put into monitoring to see if it is increasing in frequency or not, and the data that we get over the next week or two will really tell us that,” said Professor Paterson.
New research shows how quickly the virus can mutate, within the body of a patient with a chronic COVID infection
He said boosting immunity from a previous infection or vaccination is putting pressure on the virus to mutate to survive.
“The virus has always had mutation and evolution as a weapon that it can use to counteract what we are doing against it, so we have to keep monitoring its genetics.
“We’ll have to see if evolution gives us another surprise. It often does,” Professor Paterson said.
New research, recently published in the journal Nature, has shown how quickly the virus can mutate, within the body of a patient with a chronic disease. COVID-19 infection.
Professor Ravi Gupta said that in a patient who was given plasma antibodies, the virus mutated in an attempt to avoid treatment.
Professor Ravi Gupta, a clinical microbiologist at the University of Cambridge, was involved in treating a man with a malfunctioning immune system. Within days of receiving plasma antibodies from a patient who had recovered from the disease, the virus mutated in an attempt to avoid treatment.
“It was extraordinary,” he said.
“In a week it had changed its composition. Billions of virus particles had been displaced.”
Professor Gupta said that what he witnessed, the first real-time study of the evolution of the virus, had given him insight into how new variants hatch in some patients.
“In our individual, who became infected in the first wave in 2020, that virus took four months to evolve to a large extent,” he said.
Scientists have warned against unlocking restrictions before daily cases were in the ‘few thousand’
“If you look at the appearance of the Kent variant in the UK, the first sequences [of the new virus] They were in September.
“That fits very well with an infection in the first wave, in April, which gives the virus a few months to evolve and mutate, and then spread to the community once it has acquired enough mutations to make it highly transmissible.
“The second wave started around September and possibly that’s why we started to detect it in the community.”
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Professor Gupta said precautions should be taken when treating COVID infections in patients who have impaired immune systems.
“We need to be on the lookout for negative complications [of treatment] it could be, do the pertinent surveillance and administer their treatments in isolation rooms, not in open rooms, “he said.
“We should not underestimate the virus. It will find new ways to avoid antibodies and immunity. It will produce other mutations that we cannot necessarily predict.”
