New strains of coronavirus reported: Should Nevada worry?
New coronavirus strains reported in the United Kingdom and parts of Africa are causing a new wave of worries around the world.
In Nevada, no cases of a potentially more transmissible strain of COVID-19 reported in the United Kingdom this week have been detected, Dr. Mark Pandori, director of the state public health laboratory, said Thursday.
He also added that current vaccines would likely be effective against the new strain.
Officials say the new variants of the virus are dangerous because they more transmissible, though they stress there is no evidence they are making people more ill.
“There’s zero evidence that there’s any increase in severity” of COVID-19 from the latest strain, the World Health Organization’s emergencies chief, Dr. Michael Ryan, said Monday.
Concerns about the strains are impacting travel.
A new rule, which takes effect Dec. 28, will require airline passengers arriving from Britain to test negative for the coronavirus within 72 hours of their departure, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said late Thursday.
This will apply to Americans as well as foreign citizens.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the U.S. government’s top infectious disease expert, is urging people to wait for more information on the variant.
“We don’t want to overreact,” he told CNN.
Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson first announced the new strain, or variant, of the coronavirus on Dec. 19, saying it appeared to spread more easily than earlier ones and was moving rapidly through England.
New variants of the virus have also been detected in South Africa and Nigeria.
“It’s a separate lineage from the U.K. and South Africa,” the head of the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, John Nkengasong, said of the variant found in Nigeria.
Nkengasong also added that further investigation was needed. “Give us some time. … It’s still very early,” he said.
France and Japan have reported their first cases of the new strain that prompted additional restrictions in Britain.
Here are some questions and answers on what’s known about the virus variants so far.
Q: WHERE DID THIS NEW STRAIN COME FROM?
A: New variants have been seen almost since the virus was first detected in China nearly a year ago. Viruses often mutate, or develop small changes, as they reproduce and move through a population — something “that’s natural and expected,” WHO said in a statement Monday.
“Most of the mutations are trivial. It’s the change of one or two letters in the genetic alphabet that doesn’t make much difference in the ability to cause disease,” said Dr. Philip Landrigan, a former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention scientist who now directs a global health program at Boston College.
A more concerning situation is when a virus mutates by changing the proteins on its surface to help it escape from drugs or the immune system, or if it acquires a lot of changes that make it very different from previous versions.
Q: HOW DOES ONE STRAIN BECOME DOMINANT?
A: That can happen if one strain is a “founder” strain — the first one to take hold and start spreading in an area or because “superspreader” events helped it become established.
It also can happen if a mutation gives a new variant a competitive advantage, helping it spread more easily than other strains that are circulating, as may be the case in Britain.
“It’s more contagious than the original strain,” Landrigan said. “The reason it’s becoming the dominant strain in England is because it out-competes the other strains and moves faster and infects more people, so it wins the race.”
Moncef Slaoui, the chief science adviser for the U.S. government’s COVID-19 vaccine campaign, said scientists are still working to confirm whether the strain in England spreads more easily. He said it’s also possible that “seeding” of hidden cases “happened in the shadows” before scientists started looking for it.
The strain was first detected in September, WHO officials said.
Q: WHAT’S WORRISOME ABOUT IT?
A: The U.K. version of the virus has many mutations — nearly two dozen — and eight are on the spike protein that the coronavirus uses to attach to and infect cells. The spike is what vaccines and antibody drugs target.
Dr. Ravi Gupta, a virus expert at the University of Cambridge in England, said modeling studies suggest it may be up to two times more infectious than the strain that’s been most common in England so far. He and other researchers posted a report of it on a website scientists use to quickly share developments but it has not been formally reviewed or published in a journal.
Q: DOES IT MAKE PEOPLE SICKER OR MORE LIKELY TO DIE?
A: “There’s no indication that either of those is true, but clearly those are two issues we’ve got to watch,” Landrigan said. As more patients get infected with the new strain, “They’ll know fairly soon if the new strain makes people sicker.”
A WHO outbreak expert, Maria Van Kerkhove, said Monday that “the information that we have so far is that there isn’t a change” in the kind of illness or its severity from the new strain.
Q: WHAT DO THE MUTATIONS MEAN FOR TREATMENTS?
A: A couple of cases in England raise concern that the mutations in some of the emerging new strains could hurt the potency of drugs that supply antibodies to block the virus from infecting cells.
“The studies on antibody response are currently under way. We expect results in coming days and weeks,” Van Kerkhove said.
One drugmaker, Eli Lilly and Co., said that tests in its lab using strains that contain the most concerning mutation suggest that its drug remains fully active.
Q: WHAT ABOUT VACCINES?
A: Slaoui said the presumption is that current vaccines would still be effective against the variant, but that scientists are working to confirm that.
“My expectation is this will not be a problem,” he said.
Vaccines induce broad immune system responses besides just prompting the immune system to make antibodies to the virus, so they are expected to still work, several other scientists said.
Review-Journal staff writer Bill Dentzer contributed to this report.
