Over the last two months our fight against Covid-19 appears to have changed dramatically. The emergence of novel variants in the UK, South Africa and Brazil has generated plenty of headlines and concern. We shouldn’t panic. But one thing is clear: if we don’t act now, we could come to regret it.
In the UK, for obvious reason we have been most focused on the B.1.1.7 variant. The evidence seems pretty clear that it is more transmissible and potentially more severe. Part of the reason we have such extensive data on virus mutations in the UK is the quite astonishing efforts that have gone into sequencing the viral genomes. With somewhere in the region of 50 per cent of the world’s sequencing happening here, it is perhaps not surprising that we are picking variants up quickly and learning about them almost in real time.
In reality, the scientific community has known from day one that this would happen.
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