Viruses evolve naturally as they move through the population, some more than others. One of the reasons we need a flu shot every year.
New variants or strains of the virus that cause COVID-19 have been observed almost since it was first detected in China almost a year ago.
On Saturday, Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced new restrictions due to the new strain, and several European Union countries have banned or restricted some flights in the UK to try to limit any spread.
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Here is what is known about the situation.
WHAT ABOUT THE RECENT STEM FOUND IN ENGLAND?
Health experts in the UK and the US have said the strain appears to be more easily infected than others, but there is no evidence, but it is more deadly.
Patrick Vallance, the British government’s chief scientific adviser, said the strain was “moving fast and becoming the dominant option”, causing more than 60% of infections in London by December.
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The strain is also worrying because it has so many mutations – almost two dozen – and some are on the prickly protein that the virus uses to attach and infect cells. This is what current vaccines are all about.
“I’m worried about that, for sure,” but it’s too early to know how important it will eventually turn out, said Dr. Ravi Gupta, who studies viruses at Cambridge University in England. He and other researchers have posted a report on this on a site that scientists use to quickly share developments, but the paper has not been formally reviewed or published in a journal.
HOW DO THESE NEW SORTS APPEAR?
Viruses often acquire small changes in a letter or two in the genetic alphabet only through normal evolution. A slightly modified strain may become the most common in a country or region just because it is the strain that first caught on there or because the “super-spreading” events helped it take root.
A bigger concern is when a virus moves by changing the proteins on its surface to help it get rid of drugs or the immune system.
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“Emerging evidence” suggests it could start happening with the new coronavirus, wrote on Twitter Trevor Bedford, a biologist and genetics expert at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. “We have now seen the emergence and spread of several variants” that suggest this, and some are resistant to antibody treatments, he noted.
WHAT OTHER DEFORMES HAVE APPEARED?
In April, researchers in Sweden discovered a virus with two genetic modifications that appeared to make it twice as infectious, Gupta said. He said about 6,000 cases had been reported worldwide, mostly in Denmark and England.
Several variants of that strain have appeared. Some have been reported to people who took them from mink farms in Denmark. A new South African strain has the two previously seen changes, plus a few others.
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The one in the UK has the two changes and many more, including eight to the spike protein, Gupta said. It is called the “variant under investigation” because its significance is not yet known.
The strain was identified in the south-east of England in September and has been circulating in the area since then, a World Health Organization official said on Sunday.
WILL PEOPLE WHO WERE COVID-19 FROM AN OLD FAIR BE ABLE TO GET THE NEW ONE? WILL IT SUPPLY VACCINES?
Probably not, former US Food and Drug Commissioner Scott Gottlieb told CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday.
“Less likely,” Gupta agreed.
Vivek Murthy, nominated for President-elect Joe Biden’s surgeon general Vivek Murthy, told NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday that “there is no reason to believe that the vaccines that have been developed will not be effective against the virus.” .
Vaccines produce widespread responses by the immune system beyond just those to protein spikes, several experts noted.
The possibility of the new strains being resistant to existing vaccines is low, but not “non-existent,” Dr. Moncef Slaoui, chief scientific adviser for the US government’s vaccine distribution effort, told CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday.
“So far, I don’t think there has been a single option that is resilient,” he said. “This special variant from the UK, I think, is very unlikely to have escaped the vaccine’s immunity.”
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Bedford agreed.
“I’m not worried, because it would probably take many changes to the genetic code to undermine a vaccine, not just one or two mutations,” Bedford wrote on Twitter. But vaccines may need fine-tuning over time as changes build up and changes need to be more closely monitored, he wrote.
Murthy said the new strain does not change public health advice about wearing masks, washing hands and maintaining social distance.
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Associated Press writers John Hanna from Topeka, Kansas and Sylvia Hui from London contributed to the reporting.
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