UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson made an unsettling statement announcement on Friday about B 1.1.7, the coronavirus variant first found in the UK last fall that spread across the country and elsewhere. According to data recently analyzed by UK scientists, B 1.1.7 is not only more transmissible than previous strains, but it may also be more likely to cause death. While these conclusions are still preliminary, it seems worth taking them seriously.
The announcement was based on data evaluated by the New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threat Advisory Group, or NERVTAG, an independent group of scientists who helped shape the country’s response to the pandemic. Last December, his work studying B 1.1.7 solidified the consensus that the variant was more transmissible than previously circulating strains. Initially, their analysis found no evidence that B 1.1.7 was causing more serious illness or death in the population than before. But that is no longer the case.
According to your new article released As of Friday, there are now several independent analyzes of case data collected in the past few weeks pointing to the same trend – an increase in people dying from B 1.1.7 compared to people infected with other strains of the virus. Although the exact figures differ between groups, they suggest that B 1.1.7 is about 30% more likely to cause death than previous strains. Notice that, although a 30% increase seems huge, the overall death rate would still be somewhere 1%.
“Of course, this is quite worrying, given the speed with which this variant overcame strains circulating in different regions and our inability to control general transmission in many parts of the world.” Jason Kindrachuk, a virologist at the University of Manitoba, Canada, who was not involved in the new research, told Gizmodo by email.
While the authors of the new article emphasize, there are limitations to your findings. The data that UK scientists are using to study coronavirus only covers a small part of the total number of cases and deaths in the country on any given day. Some data sources, such as the results of hospitalized patients, also take longer to collect than others. This may explain why hospitalization data specifically does not seem to show that B.1.1.7 is more deadly – the data may not be updated enough to meet this pattern yet. It is also possible that B.1.1.7 is placing more people in the hospital but not necessarily changing a hospital patient’s chances of survival.
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1 possible factor that could indirectly explain why B.1.1.7 looks more deadly– hospitals are overloaded with more cases caused by a more transmissible variant – it doesn’t seem to be playing an important role, however. An analysis, from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, accounted for “hospital pressure covariates”, such as the number of hospital beds available to patients in one fan but they found no substantial change in their conclusions. The increase in mortality rates was consistent across different age groups, also, suggesting an even higher real risk of mortality from B.1.1.7 alone.
sall countries are now concerned about the emergence of B.1.1.7 and others, similar variants. Must B.1.1.7 occur outside the UK, as some experts warned, would certainly threaten to unravel the recent decline in cases and hospitalizations seen recently in some countries.
“My immediate thoughts, clear, went to the toll of this disease in our longresidents of term care institutions in Canada and what this variant could mean for an already precarious situation, ”said Kindrachuk. Canada, like the US, is new experiencing a decline in cases and hospitalizations. But outbreaks of variants similar to B 1.1.7 have already been found in local nursing homes.
More work needs to be done to confirm these findings. But no matter what the conclusions, it remains absolutely essential to do what we can to reduce the spread of the pandemic as quickly as possible. as possible, including wearing masks, avoiding internal socialization when possible, and be vaccinated when you become eligible.