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Viruses mutate all the time. Most of the new variants disappear. Sometimes they spread without altering the behavior of the virus. Very occasionally, they cause dramatic changes.
And the question that scientists now face is simple: does the VUI-202012/01 variant fall into the latter category? Does it pose a greater health risk? Or is its recent rapid spread across southern England because it has emerged in people who are infecting many other people, possibly because they are ignoring Covid-19 restrictions?
These key questions, debated last week after Health Secretary Matt Hancock revealed the existence of the new variant, were firmly answered yesterday by the government’s chief medical officer, Chris Whitty.
“As a result of the rapid spread of the new variant, preliminary model data, and rapidly increasing incidence rates in the Southeast,” he announced, “The New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threat Advisory Group (Nervtag) now considers that the new strain can spread more quickly. We have alerted the World Health Organization and we continue to analyze the available data to improve our understanding. “
These analyzes will involve scientists growing the new strain in laboratories, studying its antibody responses, and testing its cross-reactions with Covid-19 vaccines. In addition, health officials are now conducting random sequencing of samples from positive cases throughout the country in order to study their spread throughout the country and build regional maps of their prevalence. This will take at least two weeks.
The appearance of the new variant is alarming, although it should be noted that there have been several previous Covid-19 mutations. 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 that a variant of the coronavirus that originated in Spanish agricultural workers quickly spread across Europe and accounted for the majority of cases in the UK.
In none of the cases were these variants found to increase the transmission of the disease. However, it is now clear that this is not the case for the VUI-202012/01 variant. What scientists must now address are concerns about the impact of the new variant, particularly whether it will lead to an increase in cases of severe illness from Covid or whether it will actually lead to fewer cases. The other big problem is whether the new variant will be able to circumvent the protection offered by the Covid-19 vaccines now being administered in Britain.
“If the new variant was going to have a big 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 for Bioinformatics in Cambridge.
“Hospital cases as a proportion of the number of infections would have skyrocketed or drastically decreased. Neither has happened, so we can conclude that the impact on the number of severe cases is probably modest – a little more or a little less. “
Additionally, Birney said the vaccines have been 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, although obviously that needs to be thoroughly tested.”
It is not known exactly where the variant first appeared. It may simply be that Britain’s extremely robust virus surveillance system caught it earlier than other nations. “However, it is equally likely that the mutations that created this variant occurred in the UK and that is why we have looked at it first,” Birney added.
