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The novel variant coronavirus can spread faster, England’s chief medical officer Professor Chris Whitty said.
He pointed out that there is currently no evidence that the new strain causes higher death rates or affects vaccines and treatments.
However, the UK government’s chief scientific adviser Patrick Vallance has warned that the new variant is becoming the dominant strain, with cases on the rise in recent days.
Here, the PA News Agency answers some of the key questions about the variant:
There have been many mutations in the virus since it emerged in 2019.
This is to be expected – SARS-CoV-2 is an RNA virus and these viruses mutate and change.
Public Health England (PHE) said as of December 13, 1,108 cases with the new variant have been identified, mostly in the south and east of England.
It was named VUI-202012/01, the first variant under investigation in December.
Professor Whitty said the UK has informed the World Health Organization that the new variant of the coronavirus may spread faster.
In a statement on Saturday, he said that following the rapid spread of the new variant, preliminary modeling data and rapidly increasing incidence rates in the Southeast, the Threats Advisory Group New and emerging respiratory virus (NERVTAG) now considers the new strain to spread faster.
If the virus spreads faster, it will be more difficult to control.
However, there are already various strains of Covid-19 with no real consequences.
The Covid-19 Genomics UK (COG-UK) consortium said it is difficult to predict whether a given mutation is important when it first emerges, and that it would take “considerable time and effort to test the effect of several thousand combinations of mutations. “.
He said the biggest concern was any changes that lead to an increase in re-infections or vaccine failure, and the most attention was being paid to mutations in the gene that encodes the spike protein.
There are currently around 4,000 mutations in the spike protein gene.
Professor Whitty said there was no current evidence to suggest the new strain causes a higher death rate or affects vaccines and treatments.
But he said “urgent work” was underway to confirm this and warned it was “more vital than ever” for people to continue to take action to reduce the spread of the virus.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson told a Downing Street briefing that early scans showed the new strain could increase reproduction rate by 0.4 or more and could be up to 70% more transferable than the old variant.
Mr Vallance said the variant, thought to have emerged in mid-September in London or Kent, had a “significant substantial increase in transmissibility”.
He added that in December, more than 60% of infections in the capital had been the new variant, saying: “It is evolving rapidly and becoming the dominant variant.
Professor Whitty said the tier system is holding cases in other parts of the country, but the new variant poses a risk to third parties.
“If you have a low amount of this variant the rate of increase is held by the levels, but if you have a very high rate of this variant then it is not sufficiently held by the levels and it increases rapidly.” , he said, adding that people shouldn’t travel and risk spreading the variant across the country.
He said there was a risk that the variant would “travel to other parts of the country where this is currently not a problem”.
But he said measures such as social distancing and limiting contact were the ones to use.
A number of variants have been detected using sequencing studies in the UK.
A specific variant (the D614G variant) has already been detected in Western Europe and North America, which is thought to spread more easily but not to cause more serious disease.
But it is believed to be the first strain that will be studied in such detail by PHE.
Not necessarily. They might even be less virulent.
However, if they spread more easily but cause the same severity of the disease, more people will eventually get sick in a shorter period of time.
Not really. Only changes that improve virus transmission are likely to be stable and give rise to new strains in circulation.
The pressure on the virus to evolve is increased by the fact that so many millions of people have now been infected.
Most mutations will not be significant or cause concern, but some can give the virus an evolutionary advantage that can lead to higher transmission or make it more harmful.
UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock said the latest clinical advice was that this mutation was highly unlikely to fail to respond to a vaccine.
The vaccine produces antibodies against many regions of the spike protein, and a single change is unlikely to make the vaccine less effective.
However, this could happen over time as more mutations occur, as happens every year with the flu.
PHE said this new variant includes a mutation in the spike protein and that changes in this part of the spike protein can cause the virus to become more infectious and to spread more easily between people.
Scientists will grow the new strain in the lab to see how it reacts.
These include determining if it produces the same antibody response, how it responds to the vaccine, and modeling the new strain.
It could take up to two weeks for this process to be completed.
COG-UK is randomly sequencing positive samples across the UK to compile a sequencing coverage report, which is sent to each of the four public health agencies on a weekly basis.
He said random sampling is important to capture regional coverage.
Although other variants have been identified in the past, it appears that this particular strain is spreading fairly quickly, meaning it may be more transmissible and therefore warrants further investigation.
Professor Mark Walport, a member of the Government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage), said it was possible that he may have a “transmission benefit”.
The Danish government slaughtered millions of mink after it emerged that hundreds of Covid-19 cases in the country were associated with variants of SARS-CoV-2 associated with farmed mink – including 12 cases with single variant, reported Nov 5.
In October, a study suggested that a variant of the coronavirus originating in Spanish farm workers was spreading rapidly across Europe and accounted for most cases in the UK.
The variant, called 20A.EU1, is known to have spread from farm workers to local populations in Spain in June and July, with people then returning from vacations to Spain most likely playing a key role in spreading the tension across Europe.
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