LONDON – The UK has become a testing ground for how a more contagious and possibly deadly coronavirus variant is spreading through communities, displacing less transmissible ancestors and complicating vaccine development and lifting blockages.
The variant has now been identified in more than 70 countries and 40 US states, and its advance in the UK could help scientists understand its likely trajectory in the US. These charts show the spread of the variant in the UK and what British scientists are learning about it — including its higher transmissibility and lethality.
“Increasingly, since this version of the virus was discovered, we’ve really run two separate pandemics,” said Jason Leitch, national clinical director for Scotland. “This is a warning to other countries.”
British scientists detected the new variant in November and, in early December, tracked its first appearance in the UK to Kent County in southern England in September. The country was closed in November to suppress a deadly wave of infection that had been building since the fall. British public health officials were amazed by the continued spread of the virus in the south of England, despite these restrictions.
When scientists examined the genome of the variant, they found an unusually large number of mutations, some of which indicated the possibility that the new variant would spread faster than pre-existing versions. Subsequent sequencing – and a test oddity that served as a reliable proxy for the presence of the variant – revealed how quickly the variant became dominant.