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Scientists are concerned that the new mutant strain of coronavirus may more easily infect children after data suggests it spread better among young people than other strains.
Experts are urgently researching the new strain of the virus to better understand its effects on patients and vaccines.
Professor Neil Ferguson, from Imperial College London, told reporters today that data on infections in the South East showed that the new variant of the virus had a statistically significantly higher infection rate among children than other strains.
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 in this regard, but we can see that in the data. ”
“During the blockade in England, we saw a general change in the age distribution of the virus towards children, and that was true in the variant and not the variant and that is what we would expect, since we had blocked what reduced contacts but schools they were still open. But what we have seen over the course of a five or six week period is that the proportion of pillar two cases for the variant in children under 15 years was statistically significantly higher than that for the non-variant virus.
“We are still investigating the meaning of that. This is a hypothesis at the moment that has not been tested, but if it were true then this could explain a significant proportion, perhaps even most, of the increase in tram emissions seen, but much more work needs to be done to explore this actually. more detail. “
Professor Wendy Barclay, a member of the government’s New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threat Advisory Group, added: “We are not saying that this is a virus that specifically targets children or is more specific in its ability to infect children. children, but we know that Covid was not as efficient in affecting children as it was in adults. “
He said one idea was that the new strain could better connect with human cells to infect them, meaning that where the virus had previously struggled to infect children, they were now “on a more level playing field” with adults in terms of infection.
Peter Horby, chairman of NERVTAG and professor of emerging infectious diseases at the University of Oxford, said that since the initial analysis of the data, which led the government to cancel a planned five-day lifting of restrictions over Christmas, scientists now had more confidence in the risks of the new mutant strain.
He said: “This afternoon (Monday) more than a dozen scientists met again with some new faces who were not at the meeting on Friday. We go through all the data again and further analysis, both on larger data sets and with different methods. This afternoon’s conclusion is that we are now more confident that this variant has a transmission advantage over other virus variants currently in the UK. “
Scientists are struggling to study the new variant to determine whether planned vaccines will continue to be effective.
When asked how confident she was that the vaccines would be effective, Professor Barclay said: “We are not completely sure at this point and it is very important that we do an analysis of that very quickly. The most direct way to do it quickly is to look at how the antibodies that have been generated in vaccine recipients can recognize this virus and the altered spike protein it presents. That work is underway in various labs in the UK at the moment, and it will reveal whether there is a difference or not.
He added that he felt that the single major alteration of the virus’s peak protein was unlikely to be sufficient to defeat vaccines because the immune system generates antibodies that attack viruses from multiple angles, but added: “There is a possibility that the ability of antibodies to see that the virus is compromised to some degree, and that’s what we have to check. “
