Lessons from the UK for a more contagious version of Covid-19

“Increasingly, since this version of the virus was discovered, we are indeed conducting two separate pandemics,”

; said Jason Leach, Scotland’s national clinical director. “This is a warning to other countries.”

British scientists discovered the new variant in November and in early December traced its first appearance in the United Kingdom in the southern English county of Kent in September. In November, the country was blocked to quell a deadly wave of contagion that has been building up since the fall. British public health officials were puzzled by the continued spread of the virus in southern England despite these restrictions.

When researchers studied the genome of the variant, they found an unusually large number of mutations, some of which indicated the possibility of the new variant spreading faster than existing versions. Further sequencing – and the test oddity that serves as a reliable proxy for the presence of the variant – revealed how quickly the variant rose to dominance.

When the block was lifted in early December, the new version became national. The total number of cases per 100,000 people has quadrupled in London and soon the new option has been discovered in almost all parts of the UK. On January 4th, another, stricter block was imposed across the country to stop its spread. Since then, the backlog has shrunk and the government has announced plans for a phased opening in the coming months.

Public health officials have begun researching patterns of contact with people known to be infected with the new variant, now widely known as B.1.1.7. They found evidence that people infected with the variant had infected more people than those infected with the previous dominant strain. This finding enhanced genetic analysis, pointing to a more transmissible version of the pathogen.

“We haven’t seen anything like this in the UK in terms of its growth rate, in terms of its portability,” said Nick Lohmann, a professor of microbial genomics and bioinformatics at the University of Birmingham.

It is even more worrying that when public health officials and teams from UK universities began to study clinical data on those known to be infected with B.1.1.7, they found signs that the option could to be associated with a higher risk of death.

A preliminary analysis from Scotland suggests that infection with the variant may be 65% more likely to lead to hospitalization and 37% more likely to result in death than infection with the older version of the virus. Scientists say these findings are not definitive, and some studies suggest that the link with higher mortality is weak or the option may even be associated with a lower risk of death.

Still, the evidence was enough for a group of scientists advising the UK government to say this month that B.1.1.7 may be at greater risk of both hospitalization and death than the established versions.

Surveys of patients conducted by the UK National Statistics Office between November and January made another finding: B.1.1.7 infection can lead to slightly different symptoms, which can help doctors identify possible cases. .

The classic symptoms of Covid-19 – fever, cough and shortness of breath – are slightly more common among those with the new version than the old ones. Patients reporting loss of taste or smell are less common. And gastrointestinal complaints were more common in the case of the new option.

One cold comfort for the UK, according to public health officials, is that the new option is now so dominant and so transmissible that other options of concern to epidemiologists, such as those identified in South Africa and Brazil, have not won much. force. Another reason for optimism is that laboratory tests and some clinical trials, as well as actual vaccination in the United Kingdom, suggest that the option could be offset by the current range of vaccines.

Dr. Philip Dormitzer, Pfizer Inc.

The chief scientific officer of the virus vaccines told UK lawmakers on Wednesday that the company sees protection against the UK option in real data from Israel and the UK, “equivalent to the protection we saw in controlled studies before the circulation of this option. . “

However, the rapid progress and unusual characteristics of the variant mean that it continues to worry, say disease experts, especially if vaccines do not work.

“This is a new beast,” said Eric Topol, a professor of molecular medicine at Scripps Research in California. He said he did not think it was widely believed that the new option could create a new pandemic, “driven by a tougher fighting virus”.

– Jason French, Andrew Levinson, Max Rust, Josh Ulick, Dov Friedman and Randy Yap contributed to this article.

Write to Jason Douglas at jason.douglas@wsj.com and Joanna Sagden at joanna.sugden@wsj.com