Manas Dasgupta
NEW DELHI, Dec 25: Even as contradictory reports have emerged over the origin and fatality rate of the muted variant of the Covid virus recently found in the United Kingdom, a scientific study in London has concluded that the new virus was 56 per cent more transmissible than the old variant which would lead to the infection spreading faster needing more hospitalization and possibly more deaths in the new year.
While the South African government on Thursday rejected Britain’s allegations that the new variant of the coronavirus found in South Africa had contributed to a second wave of infections in the UK, scientists in London have urged for a faster vaccine rollout to help prevent more deaths.
The UK leveled the allegation against South Africa because the new virus variant that was detected in the UK has a mutation occurring at a site common with the South African strain, known as 501.V2, but the South African government claimed that they are “two completely independent lineages.”
The new variant, which emerged in southeast England in November and is spreading fast, “is likely to boost hospitalisations and deaths from Covid next year, a study by the Centre for Mathematical Modelling of Infectious Diseases at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine said.
Researchers, focusing on the English south east, east and London, said it was still uncertain whether the mutated strain was more or less deadly than its predecessor.
“Nevertheless, the increase in transmissibility is likely to lead to a large increase in incidence, with Covid-19 hospitalisations and deaths projected to reach higher levels in 2021 than were observed in 2020, even if regional tiered restrictions implemented before 19 December are maintained,” they said.
The authors warned that a national lockdown imposed in England in November was unlikely to prevent an increase of infections “unless primary schools, secondary schools, and universities are also closed”.
Any easing of control measures, meanwhile, would likely prompt “a large resurgence of the virus”.
This meant that “it may be necessary to greatly accelerate vaccine roll-out to have an appreciable impact in suppressing the resulting disease burden”.
In announcing more stringent lockdown measures over the Christmas holiday, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said on Saturday the new viral strain “may be up to 70 percent more transmissible than the original version of the disease”.
The discovery of the new strain set off alarm bells worldwide just as more countries began vaccination campaigns to halt a pandemic that has claimed more than 1.7 million lives since it emerged a year ago in China.
Many countries including India quickly imposed bans on travel from the UK but some of the governments in the European Union have since begun to relax the restrictions because of the Christmas and the New Year celebrations.
Amidst the stress imposed on the administration by the muted variant, the UK government has launched mass vaccination with more than six lakh of the its citizens having received the vaccine developed by Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech by Thursday, the Department of Health said. “Over the coming weeks and months, the rate of vaccination will increase as more doses become available and the program continues to expand, with more vaccines being delivered direct to care homes,” the department added.
The muted variant was also threatening the diplomatic relations between the countries blaming each other for the spread of the virus. To UK’s allegation, the South African health minister Zweli Mkhize said in a statement that there was no evidence that 501.V2 found in his country caused more severe disease or increased mortality than any other variant that’s been sequenced around the world.
Mkhize’s comments came a day after UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock announced that flights from South Africa would be banned and that anyone who’s been there in the past two weeks must quarantine immediately. Several other countries have also halted flights from South Africa.
The new UK strain was identified about a month before the South African variant appeared to have developed, Mkhize pointed out citing ongoing research by the Network for Genomic Surveillance in South Africa, which was launched in June. He described Hancock’s announcement on travel restrictions as “unfortunate.”
“It is the widely shared view of the scientific community that, given the current circumstantial evidence, the risks of travel bans may outweigh the benefits, and that it is possible to contain the variants while sustaining international travel,” Mkhize said. “We, therefore, maintain that non-pharmaceutical interventions and strict containment measures remain most important to reduce the risk of transmission,” he maintained.