Corona Daily 217: B.1.1.7 – Variant of Concern

For the UK, it has started all over again. On 8 January, it surpassed a record 68000 infections, and 1325 deaths. UK’s toll of 81000 deaths till date is the highest in Europe. More worryingly, at least one person in 50 is infected in England, and one in 30 in London. Coronavirus’s new avatar has isolated Britain more than Brexit. Next week, the ritual of weekly clapping for health workers will start again. The crisis is termed as UK’s biggest since the Second World War.

***** 

B.1.1.7 is a mutation, a new incarnation, of the coronavirus that hit the world a year ago. Viruses mutate all the time. It’s like Apple coming up with a new i-phone version every year. The company adds or enhances features, but the core of the i-phone is recognizable. (If you are lucky, your old charger may fit the new i-phone.)

Thousands of mutations of the covid virus have been identified. What is so special about B.1.1.7? Is it not possible that the British population simply flouted lockdown rules in winter, socialised more than necessary and the increase in transmission coincided with a new mutation?

Now, the people movement is verifiable. Smartphones are our traceable limbs. We value our smartphones more than our privacy. Google records data giving precise movements of smartphone users. The analysis of such data in the UK has shown that people movement was not changed even in regions with soaring virus transmission.

***** 

Did this variant start in the UK? Not necessarily, but it was first identified there. In March, UK started a well-run national programme to track mutations. It invested £20 million ($27 million) to create a consortium that sought samples from hospitals across the country. Their labs started analyzing and sequencing each mutation, and fit them on an evolutionary tree. UK has sequenced 209,038 coronavirus genomes, more than any other country.

The virus tests currently offer only binary results: positive or negative. Imagine a sophisticated system saying you are positive with the English variant, or with the South African variant. That would greatly assist in contact tracing as well. If pandemics become a way of life, testing can reach that level of detail in future. We are not there yet.

The worrying thing the UK’s sequencing consortium found was that the nation’s November multi-tier lockdown did an excellent job of driving down the spread of the ordinary variant, but it couldn’t stop the spread of B.1.1.7.

*****

What is special about this variant is its exceptionally large number of mutations – 23 in all. Only six of them are silent, meaning they make no significant difference. The 17 remaining mutations, the non-silent ones, make it better at infecting cells, at making more copies of itself once it enters the cells, and at evading antibodies generated by an earlier infection. In other words, someone who had covid with other variants is liable to be reinfected with this variant.

Twenty-three is a large number. If a virus going into a dressing room is expected to come out with a changed tie or a changed hat, now it emerges with a whole new outfit.

*****

Available data suggests the new variant arose fully formed in a single person. (This is the best hypothesis, that person is not known).

For the virus, each person it infects is like a lab, a playground for it to experiment. In a patient with compromised immunity, the virus can live for weeks or months. It is believed one such patient was treated with antibodies from a recovered patient. Having enough time at hand to experiment, the virus assumed a new form to beat those antibodies. Antibodies wiped out the weak variants, leaving others like this variant resistant to treatment.

Hospitals have been giving some patients a buffet of therapies, hoping some combination will work. But that could have contributed to the development of new variants. It is suggested the medical community should use treatment options carefully. Saving a single immunocompromised patient may have the side effect of starting a new variant globally.

*****

The new variant is a critical subject. More on it tomorrow.

Ravi