New Covid-19 Variant Roils South Africa --- Government weighs more restrictions to counter mutations that make virus riskier

"JOHANNESBURG -- South Africa's government is considering new public-health restrictions to contain a fast-spreading new variant of the coronavirus scientists say has a high number of mutations that may make it more transmissible and allow it to evade some of the immune responses triggered by previous infection or vaccination.

The warning from the South African scientists and the Health Ministry, issued on Thursday, prompted the World Health Organization to call an urgent meeting of experts for Friday to discuss whether to declare the new strain a "variant of concern."

The WHO uses this label for virus strains that have been proven to be more contagious, lead to more serious illness or decrease the effectiveness of public-health measures, tests, treatments or vaccines. Other variants of concern include the Delta variant that is now dominant world-wide and the Alpha variant that drove a deadly wave of infections across Europe and the U.S. last winter and spring.

While the scientists said they were still studying the exact combination of mutations of the new variant -- currently dubbed B.1.1.529 -- and how they impact the virus, its discovery underlines how changes to the virus's genome continue to pose a risk to the world's emergence from the pandemic.

"It just again reinforces the fact that this invisible enemy we are dealing with is very unpredictable," said South African Health Minister Joe Phaahla.

He said the government would hold discussions over the weekend on whether new restrictions on social gatherings and other activities such as travel were necessary to stem the spread of the new variant.

"This is going to present a major challenge," he said, urging all South Africans who haven't gotten vaccinated against Covid-19 to do so now.

 

Only around 24% of South Africa's 60 million citizens are currently fully vaccinated.

 

Researchers first detected B.1.1.529 on Nov. 12, said Tulio de Oliveira, who heads the Centre for Epidemic Response & Innovation at South Africa's Stellenbosch University and is a member of the WHO working group monitoring new coronavirus variants.

Since then, the variant has driven an exponential rise in Covid-19 infections in the country, albeit from a very low level, with the number of new infections topping 1,200 on Wednesday, about four times as many as two weeks ago.

B.1.1.529 is now responsible for around 90% of cases in South Africa's most populous province, Gauteng, home to the political and economic capitals of Pretoria and Johannesburg, quickly crowding out the Delta variant. It has also been detected in neighboring Botswana and in a South African traveler in Hong Kong, Prof. de Oliveira said.

 

The new variant has more than 50 mutations compared with the coronavirus that was first detected in Wuhan, China, in 2019.

 

More than 30 of those mutations are in the spike protein, through which the virus attaches to human cells and which is the main target of the current crop of Covid-19 vaccines.

 

While many of these mutations appear to be new, several are known to scientists from other variants of concern, where they appeared to make the virus more contagious or allowed it to evade parts of the immune response prompted by vaccination or a previous Covid-19 infection.

 

"All these things give us some concern that this variant might have not just enhanced transmissibility, so spread more efficiently, but might also be able to get around parts of the immune system and the protection we have in our immune system," said Richard Lessells, an infectious-disease specialist at the KwaZulu-Natal Research Innovation and Sequencing Platform." [1]

 

Tolerating corruption and low vaccination rates in poorer populations gives us all new combinations of dangerous mutations in the virus, threatening the health and lives of us all.  

 

1. World News: New Covid-19 Variant Roils South Africa --- Government weighs more restrictions to counter mutations that make virus riskier
Steinhauser, Gabriele.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 26 Nov 2021: A.7.