The news that the coronavirus strain sweeping Britain could be more lethal as well as more mobile has raised new concerns about the variability that has spread to dozens of countries.
British experts initially said their evidence suggested that the new pressure circulating in the UK – one of several that has emerged internationally in recent months – ranged from 50 per cent. one hundred and 70 percent more portable.
On Friday, however, the government said the new variable could be 30-40 percent more lethal, though it stressed the assessment relied on scarce data.
What has changed?
In mid-January, two separate studies by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and Imperial College London were assigned to the New and New Respiratory Virus Risk Advisory Group (NERVTAG).
They combined data from people who tested positive for the virus in the community – rather than in the hospital – with death data and found an approximately 30 percent increase in the risk of death associated with the new snoring.
The groups used slightly different methods, but the two matched people with the new difference to those with the old changes, taking into account other variables such as age and place and maintaining control. for hospitals to be under pressure.
Other studies by the University of Exeter and Public Health England also found higher deaths and even higher figures.
Based on these analyzes, NERVTAG stated that there was a “reasonable possibility” that infection with the new variant is associated with a greater risk of death compared to previously reported variants.
The increase in transmission associated with the variant was already causing panic, because the more people who get the virus the more people suffer from serious illness and risk of death.
“Unfortunately, it looks like this virus could be both” more contagious and potentially more deadly, “said John Edmunds, a professor at the LSHTM Center for Mathematical Modeling of Diseases infectious, to a Monday press release
“So it’s actually turning a lot worse unfortunately,” he said.
How reliable are the decisions?
Researchers said there was still uncertainty in the data and said the picture would become clearer in the next few weeks.
Edmunds said the findings were “statistically significant”.
But he said while the studies used information from those tested in the community, the majority of people who die from COVID-19 go straight to the hospital and get tested. sin.
Researchers do not yet have that hospital information.
NERVTAG said this delay in data may be why the studies did not find evidence of an increase in hospitalization of people with the new variant, which appears to contradict worse findings of disease.
He added that the mortality data used in the research covered only 8 per cent of all deaths during the study period and said that the results may not “therefore be representative of the total population”. .
Why more deadly?
Researchers believe that it may be the same set of mutations that has made it more contagious – although more emphasis is needed on more research.
One mutation in particular increases the ability of the virus to more strongly infect human cells and NERVTAG chief Peter Horby, an emerging professor of infectious disease at Oxford University, said evidence of suggests that this may make it easier to become infectious.
“If it is then able to spread between cells much more quickly within the lungs, that could increase the rate of infection and inflammation, which can progress faster than your body can respond, so it could explain every feature of the virus, “he said.
Bjorn Meyer, an expert at the French Institut Pasteur, told AFP that the case could be a viral load.
“The virus may not have become more lethal in that way, but it could become more or less contagious, which could cause more damage in patients as a whole,” he said. e.
Does this affect medications?
Horby, who is also leading the Rehabilitation trial – which identified the steroid dexamethasone as effective for patients with severe hospitalization – said there was “no evidence” that treatments would not work as well.
Anti-inflammatories such as dexamethasone “should work just as well because it is not related to the virus, it is related to the host response,” he said.
Horby said overall improvements in therapies and treatments – including things like better strategies for hospital respiratory support – have brought case mortality rates down from the first wave and could even “differentiate balance with this new change “.
As for the vaccines, a preliminary study this month from Britain and the Netherlands found that the opposite would not be possible to avoid the protective effects of conventional vaccines.
Pfizer / BioNTech and Moderna have also released early research suggesting that their vaccines would still be effective against snoring.
Don’t viruses weaken as they spread?
Scientists have tried to challenge the notion that the virus becomes less virulent as it becomes more contagious.
The virus that causes COVID-19 is already “excellent at its job of getting overseas” said Emma Hocroft, an epidemiologist at the University of Bern.
“So I don’t think we can make this assumption that it wants to be so hard. I don’t want to diminish that it’s heavy for a lot of people, but for the vast majority. some people, it ‘s not bad, “she told AFP.
She said the potential for transmission before killing was “very low bar”, citing diseases such as measles and HIV that have remained so dangerous.
Graham Medley, professor of Infectious Disease Modeling at the LSHTM, told Monday’s press conference that despite uncertainty in the new studies on the new variant in the UK, they should rule out thought it would become so brutal.
“Of course this is not true that this is a more virulent virus,” he said.
© Agence France-Presse