The race against the virus that causes COVID-19 has taken a new turn: mutations occur quickly, and the longer it takes to vaccinate people, the more likely it is that a variant that can circumvent current tests, treatments and vaccines will occur. .
Coronavirus is becoming more and more genetically diverse, and health officials say the high rate of new cases is the main reason. Each new infection gives the virus a chance to move, as it makes copies on its own, threatening to undo the progress made so far to control the pandemic.
On Friday, the World Health Organization called for more efforts to detect new variants. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said a new version first identified in the UK could become dominant in the US by March. Although it does not cause more severe diseases, it will lead to more hospitalizations and deaths just because it spreads much more easily, the CDC said, warning of “a new phase of exponential growth.”
“We take it very seriously,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the US government’s top infectious disease expert, told NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
“We have to do everything we can now … to get as low a transmission as possible,” said Dr. Michael Mina of Harvard University. “The best way to prevent mutant strains is to slow down transmission.”
To date, vaccines appear to remain effective, but there are signs that some of the new mutations may undermine virus testing and reduce the effectiveness of antibody drugs as treatments.
“We are in a race against time,” because the virus “can come across a mutation” that makes it more dangerous, said Dr. Pardis Sabeti, an evolutionary biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.
Younger people may be less willing to wear masks, avoid crowds, and take other steps to avoid infection, as the current strain does not appear to make them ill, but “in a single mutational change, it may.” she warned. Sabeti documented a change in the Ebola virus during the 2014 outbreak, which greatly aggravated it.
LIFTING MUTATIONS
It is normal for viruses to acquire small changes or mutations in their genetic alphabet as they reproduce. Those that help the virus to flourish give it a competitive advantage and thus eliminate other versions.
In March, just a few months after the coronavirus was discovered in China, a mutation called D614G appeared that caused it to spread. It soon became the dominant version in the world.
Now, after months of relatively calm, “we have begun to see a striking evolution,” the biologist Trevor Bedford of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle wrote on Twitter last week. “The fact that we have noticed three variants of concern appears since September, suggesting that many more will come.”
One was first identified in the United Kingdom and quickly became dominant in parts of England. It has now been reported in at least 30 countries, including the United States.
Shortly afterwards, South Africa and Brazil reported new variants, and the main mutation in the version identified in the UK appeared on a different version “circulating in Ohio … at least since September,” said Dr. Dan Jones, a molecular pathologist at Ohio State University, announced the finding last week.
The important finding here is that it is unlikely to be related to travel and, in turn, may reflect the virus that acquires similar mutations independently as more infections occur, Jones said.
This also suggests that travel restrictions may be ineffective, Mina said. Because the United States has so many cases, “we can create our own variants as bad or worse” as those in other countries, he said.
___
TREATMENT, VACCINE, RISK OF REINFECTION
Some laboratory tests suggest that variants identified in South Africa and Brazil may be less susceptible to antibody drugs or convalescent plasma, antibody-rich blood from COVID-19 survivors – both helping people fight the virus.
Government scientists are “actively considering” this possibility, said Dr. Janet Woodcock of the US Food and Drug Administration on Thursday. The government encourages the development of more antibody treatments than single-antibody drugs to have more ways to target the virus if one proves ineffective, she said.
Current vaccines induce immune responses broad enough to remain effective, say many scientists. Sufficient genetic change may eventually require changing the vaccine formula, but “it will probably be years if we use the vaccine rather than Monday,” Dr. Andrew Pavia of the University of Utah said Thursday in a webcast. Society of Infectious Diseases of America.
Health officials are also worried that if the virus changes enough, people could receive COVID-19 a second time. Reinfection is currently rare, but Brazil has already confirmed a case in someone with a new variant who had been ill with an earlier version a few months earlier.
___
WHAT TO DO
“We see a lot of variants, viral diversity, because there are a lot of viruses out there,” and reducing new infections is the best way to reduce it, said Dr. Adam Lauring, an infectious disease expert at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
Loyce Pace, who chairs the global nonprofit Health Council and is a member of President Joe Biden’s COVID-19 advisory board, said the same precautions scientists have always advised “still work and still matter.”
“We still want people to disguise themselves,” she said Thursday on a webcast hosted by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
“We still need people to limit gathering with people outside their household. We still need people to wash their hands and be really vigilant about those public health practices, especially when these options arise. ”
___
AP medical writer Carla K. Johnson of Seattle contributed to the reporting.
___
The Associated Press Department of Health and Science receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. AP is solely responsible for all content.