TORONTO – New COVID-19 strain of Delta subvariant named “”Variant under investigationby the UK, saying early evidence suggests it may be more transmissible than Delta.
The strain does not appear to cause more serious illness or make vaccines less effective, the British Health Safety Agency (UKHSA) said in an announcement released Friday. It also received the official name of “VUI-21OCT-01”.
The sub-variant, which was previously dubbed “Delta Plus” or “AY.4.2”, was first detected in England in July. UKHSA data shows estimate 6 percent recent cases of COVID-19 in the UK, where the number of cases has increased, belong to this Delta sub-variant.
“Viruses mutate often and at random, and it is no surprise that new variants continue to emerge as the pandemic continues, especially as long as the case rate remains high,” said the UKHSA Executive Director Dr Jenny Harries. “This should serve as objective proof that this pandemic is not over.”
Further investigation is needed to confirm whether the strain, which has also been detected in Canada and the we, is indeed more contagious than the Delta variant, according to the UKHSA.
“As AY.4.2 is still at a fairly low frequency, a 10 percent increase in its transmissibility could have caused only a small number of additional cases,” said François Balloux, director of the Institute of Genetics of University College London. Science Media Center Tuesday. “As such, this has not been the cause of the recent increase in the number of cases in the UK”
If the subvariant is in fact more transmissible, Balloux said the difference would not be the same as that caused by the Delta variant, which was much more contagious than any strain in circulation at the time.
“We are dealing with a small potential increase in transmissibility that would not have a comparable impact on the pandemic,” he said.
A small number of cases of the new strain have appeared in Canada, but it is not known whether it is more contagious than the Delta variant, according to Dr. Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization at the University of Saskatchewan. .
Dr Rasmussen said the UK’s robust genomic surveillance, which sequences around 10% of the positive COVID-19 cases they have, may be a reason they have detected more cases.
“In a lot of places, we still don’t have the monitoring capacity to find these variants if they appear,” she told CTV News Channel on Wednesday. “They also might not emerge. We really haven’t seen anything that indicates this is becoming prevalent in Canada.”
Dr. Rasmussen also believes that it is likely that the vaccines currently being deployed in Canada will be effective against the subvariant.
“The vaccines we have now are quite effective against the original Delta recipe,” she said. “Of course we should wait and see, we should take a look at it, but there’s really nothing that concerns me about the effectiveness of the vaccine against this particular subline.”
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