A new strain of COVID-19 is fast becoming the most dominant strain in the UK.
Named “VUI-202012/01”, this new coronavirus mutation is thought to be more infectious than COVID-19, but there is no evidence that it is more lethal than COVID-19.
“Some good news. One is that there doesn’t seem to be any effect of these mutations on the vaccine’s effectiveness,” said Dr. David Engelthaler, director of the North Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGEN) in Flagstaff. One of the mutations seems to make the spike protein fit more easily into cellular receptors. It’s kind of like a better key that fits in a lock. So this makes the virus enter faster, replicate faster and then transmit potentially faster.
“It may surprise people that we already have more than one strain of coronavirus there, that it has moved many times before,” said Dr. Ross Goldberg, director of the Arizona Medical Association. “Imagine a big LEGO set and I’ll change some of the LEGOs out there. You may have changed some of the interior design, but overall, what it is hasn’t changed.”
Dr Goldberg said that the current vaccine distributed in the United States had been tested against several different strains and believed that the vaccine would protect against strain VUI-202012/01.
Viral mutations are common, and Dr. Engelthaler said the current strain of COVID-19 is a mutation in the original virus that triggered the pandemic.