A coronavirus update: new variants
Everyone wearing a mask in this Tokyo airport, but still there are lots of problems, and lots of travellers
So there’s much concern about new variants of the SARS-CoV2 virus, one from the UK, now known as the Kent variant, and one from South Africa. My main source of info on this will be the SGU podcast 809, from January 6.
The Kent strain is more infectious than the original, by 50-60%, though not more deadly. However its infectiousness is fast making it the more dominant strain. The South African variant, though, is causing most concern, as virologists are uncertain about its response to the vaccines now available. It has some of the same mutations that are in the Kent variant, making it also more infectious, but it also has mutations that allow it to evade antibodies targeting previous variants. This won’t make the variant immune to the vaccine, but it will make the vaccine less effective, though exactly how much less effective is the big question currently.
Another major concern is that this new variant can infect people who’ve already contracted and recovered from the virus. As Dr Steven Novella and others on the podcast argue (and this quote is ‘tidied up’ from direct speech):
This is the result of allowing a pandemic to simmer along over time. Mutations are inevitable, though different viruses mutate at different rates. SARS-CoV2 has error-correction mechanisms when it replicates, so that’s why it mutates more slowly. But if an infection in an individual, or an epidemic, lingers long enough, you’ll still get mutations. Part of the problem is that, with so many people infected, for so long, there are a great number of opportunities for new variants to arise. There are thousands of roughly equivalent variants, which are neutral or inconsequential in effect, but now we have two variants that are more mutated, and more consequential. They have a suite of mutations that seem to have developed much faster than the background mutation rate of the virus. It’s thought that this is because in individual patients who’d had the infection for months and were being treated during that time, the increased selective pressure on the virus may have caused this suite of mutations to be formed. This kind of mutation rate has been shown in the lab with respect to antibiotic resistance in bacteria.
The point here for the future is to get to a level of herd immunity through vaccination. Considering that new strains arise regularly, as with the flu (and we don’t yet know how regularly this will happen with SARS-CoV-2), it may be that the vaccine will have to be tweaked regularly to cover these new strains. Time will tell, and of course we don’t yet know how effective the new vaccines will be against these current major variants. In fact we don’t know for sure how long the vaccines, or the antibodies they create, will be effective, regardless of these variants. But mRNA vaccines can apparently be produced, and tweaked, quite quickly, once the variant’s RNA is sequenced.
All of this tells us that the science is generally on top of this. The major problem is political, and social. Trying to get people to do the right thing, to wear a mask, physically distance, avoid large indoor gatherings and to get vaccinated when the vaccine becomes available. This is easier in some regions of the world than in others, and the problems ranges from distrust or ignorance of modern science, to conspiratorial thinking, to rights over responsibilities, to cultures of compliance and non-compliance. Humans are delightfully diverse, or just a mess, and the WHO warns us that this may not be ‘the big one’ in pandemic terms. The year 2021 will not see the end of all this – far from it.
Stop press – a new variant has just been found in Japan in four travellers from Brazil, the Sydney Morning Herald reports. Twelve mutations have been identified, one of which is shared by the UK and South African strains, suggesting a higher infection rate. The travellers are in quarantine in Tokyo airport. Due to a steep rise in cases, a state of emergency has been declared for Tokyo and surrounding prefectures. And so it goes.
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