The race against the virus that causes COVID-19 has taken a new turn: mutations are emerging quickly, and the longer it takes to vaccinate the population, the more likely a variant that tests, treats and current vaccines is to emerge.
The coronavirus is gaining in genetic diversity and health authorities say the high number of new infections is the main cause. Each new infection allows the virus to mutate by copying itself, threatening to reverse the progress made so far in managing the pandemic.
The World Health Organization on Friday called for more efforts to detect new variants. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said the new version first identified in Britain could be the dominant one in the country in March. While it won’t cause more severe symptoms, it will cause more hospitalizations and deaths because it spreads much more easily, the CDC reported, warning of “a new phase of exponential growth.”
“We take it really seriously,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci, the US government’s top infectious disease expert, on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Saturday.
“We must now do everything we can to keep transmissions as low as possible,” said Michael Mina, a physician at Harvard University. “The best way to prevent the appearance of mutant variants is to slow down the infections.”
For now, the vaccines seem to remain effective, but there is some evidence that some of the new mutations could undermine tests for the virus and reduce the effectiveness of antibodies as a treatment.
“We are in a race against time” because the virus “could encounter a mutation” that makes it more dangerous, said Dr. Pardis Sabeti, an evolutionary biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.
Young people may be less willing to wear masks, avoid crowds, and take other measures to avoid contamination, because the current variant does not appear to cause serious disease, but “with a mutation change, it does,” he cautioned. Sabeti documented a change in the Ebola virus that made it worse during the 2014 outbreak.
“We see a lot of viral variants and diversity because there are many viruses,” and reducing new infections is the best way to stop this, said Dr. Adam Lauring, an infectious disease expert at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
Loyce Pace, who leads the nonprofit Global Health Council and is a member of President-elect Joe Biden’s COVID-19 advisory board, said the same precautions scientists have advised all along “are still working and continuing. to be important “.
“We continue to want people to wear masks,” he said Thursday during a webcast from Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health.
“We still need people to limit encounters with people outside the home.” We still need people to wash their hands and be really vigilant about these public health practices, especially when these variants arise ”.