UK coronavirus variant “underway to sweep the world,” says geneticist

LONDON – A variant of the coronavirus that first appeared in the UK and has since been identified in more than 50 countries, could become the dominant form of the virus worldwide, according to the head of the Kingdom’s genetic surveillance program United.

“The new variant has swept the country and will sweep the world, in all likelihood,” said Professor Sharon Peacock, director of the Covid-19 Genomics UK Consortium.

“In the future, I think the key will be whether something (a variant) is particularly problematic with vaccines,” she told the station’s Newcast podcast.

The Peacock-led group was created in April 2020 and brings together highly respected experts and institutes to collect, sequence and analyze genomes of the virus as part of the response to the UK pandemic. To date, he has tracked the genetic history of more than 250,000 samples of the virus.

The consortium first detected the most infectious variant of the virus, dubbed the “British variant” and formally known as “B1.1.7”, in Kent, southeastern England, in September 2020, through retrospective analyzes of samples from virus.

Viruses mutate all the time, but experts are concerned when a virus mutates to become more transmissible, as in this case, or more deadly. The higher infection rates associated with the variant identified in the UK are likely to lead to more hospitalizations and, unfortunately, more deaths; as a result, containing it has become a priority.

The variant spread rapidly across southeastern England and London, and has now become the dominant strain in the United Kingdom. It has also been detected in more than 50 countries, with health officials struggling to isolate cases, although this most virulent strain is believed to be widely circulating.

It is difficult to know the exact origin of the mutation and, given the work of the consortium, they were likely to find new variants in the United Kingdom (other countries that have sequenced the virus genome, such as Denmark and South Africa, have also discovered variants) Peacock, who is also a professor of public health and microbiology at Cambridge University, said she believed sequencing of coronavirus variants would be necessary for at least 10 years.

So far, there have been more than 107 million cases of coronavirus and more than 2.3 million deaths worldwide, according to Johns Hopkins University.

In addition to the virus variant seen for the first time in southeastern England, two new variants appeared in a group of cases in the cities of Liverpool and Bristol, which scientists are now monitoring.

The Bristol variant has been designated as a “concern variant” by Britain’s New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threat Advisory Group.

Peacock said that while the mutant variants were a concern, the variant seen in and around Bristol was in “contained areas and in very low numbers”, with only 21 cases detected so far.

“It is inevitable that the virus will continue to mutate, but what is worrying is that the B1.1.7 variant that we have been circulating for a few weeks and months is starting to mutate again and get new mutations, which can affect the way we treat the virus in terms of vaccine immunity and effectiveness, ”he added.