“I’m afraid I won’t have good news. ” Professor Salim Abdool Karim is not the man to sound the alarm unnecessarily. Since the start of the pandemic, the epidemiologist has been coordinating the South African scientific response to Covid-19, like Dr. Anthony Fauci in the United States. He stood out with his clear and calm style. But this Friday, December 18, he is worried.
A new variant of SARS-CoV-2 has been identified in South Africa and appears to be spreading at an unprecedented rate. South African researchers were the first to find out. They are the ones who alerted their counterparts around the world, leading to the discovery of a variant close to that spotted in the United Kingdom in particular.
Like a computer software update, this new variant of SARS-CoV-2 has a name: “501.V2”. Identified in early October, “He began to dominate very quickly the samples that we are sequencing”, analyzes the virologist Tulio de Oliveira, head of the Krisp laboratory in Kwazulu Natal. In mid-November, the “501.V2” variant represented 90% of the genomes sequenced by South African scientists. An unprecedented proportion.
Very soon after the appearance of SARS-CoV-2, different strains of the virus appeared as a result of various mutations. These mutations are classic in the evolution of viruses. But the “501.V2” version is the only one, so far, which has imposed itself in this way among all the genomes analyzed. A peculiarity which suggests that this variant propagates faster than the others.
“More contagious but less serious”
Alerted by their South African counterparts, British scientists, who are sequencing genomes in large numbers, estimate that the variant is 70% more contagious than the others. If the number of sequenced samples, lower in South Africa, does not yet allow these figures to be confirmed, the South African teams have observed that the samples taken from patients with the “501.V2” version present a load. viral higher than the others, which tends to confirm the idea of a more contagious variant.
Is the new variant more dangerous than the others? “For the moment, nothing seems to indicate it”, says Professor Tulio de Oliveira. In South Africa, the first observations from the second wave seem to show that in a number of equal cases, the mortality between the first wave and the second is comparable. “This is a flawed comparison and the data is really preliminary, but at this point it doesn’t show any red flags.”, wants to reassure Professor Salim Abdool Karim.
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