The British chief medical officer announced on Saturday that Britain had identified a new variant of coronavirus that could “spread faster” than previous strains of the virus, prompting Prime Minister Boris Johnson to impose new restrictions on parts of the nation to control its spread.
“We’re learning about this as we go, but we already know enough, more than enough, to be sure we need to act now,” Johnson said at a news briefing on Saturday, where he set new restrictions on London and other parts of England before the Christmas holiday.
“When the virus changes its method of attack, we need to change our method of defense,” Johnson said.
The British government announced the new strain of coronavirus on Monday, following an increase in the number of cases in the south and east of England. Just over 1,100 Covid-19 cases with the new variant had been identified as of Sunday, according to a Public Health England statement.
Now, it is believed that the new strain could be up to 70 percent more communicable than the original strain of the disease, Johnson said Saturday, adding that it appears to be leading to the rapid spread of infections. Johnson urged residents to refrain from traveling and “stay local” to prevent the new strain from moving through the country and abroad.
The UK reports about 24,061 new cases of Covid-19 each day, based on an average week, an increase of more than 40% from a week ago, according to a CNBC analysis of data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.
“These are given early and are under review, but they are the best we have at the moment and we need to act on the information we have, because now it is spreading very quickly,” Johnson said.
Professor Chris Whitty, England’s chief medical officer, told a news conference that “viruses move all the time”. Seasonal flu moves every year and there have already been other new variants of the coronavirus identified in countries such as Spain, according to Public Health England.
What needs to be answered is whether the new strain is more easily transmitted, makes people sick and changes the way a person’s immune system responds to the virus if they have already been infected or vaccinated, Whitty said.
To date, a collection of evidence from genetic, frequency and laboratory studies suggests that the new strain “has a significant and substantial increase in transmissibility,” Whitty said. However, so far there is no evidence to suggest that the new strain results in a higher mortality rate.
Health officials believe the new variant first appeared in mid-September in London or Kent and, in mid-November, is believed to have caused about 28% of cases in London and other parts of the south-east of England, said Whitty.
Now those numbers are much higher, he said. In London, last week’s data suggest that the new variant accounted for more than 60% of new cases, Whitty said.
“So what this tells us is that this new variant is not only moving fast, but it is increased in its ability to transmit, but it is becoming the dominant variant. It beats all the others in terms of transmission,” he said. he.
However, there is “no evidence” that it will cause more severe illness, more hospitalizations or “more problems than the other virus,” Whitty said. Although there is reason to suspect that the new variant could alter someone’s immune response to the disease, there is nothing to indicate so far, he said.
“Our working assumption at this time, on the part of all scientists, is that the response to the vaccine should be appropriate for this virus,” he said. “Obviously, this needs to be looked at in the future and we need to be careful about that.”
The UK has alerted the World Health Organization and will continue to analyze data on the new strain.