LONDON (Reuters) – A new strain of COVID-19 identified in the UK may spread more quickly and urgent work is underway to confirm it does not cause a higher mortality rate, British chief medical officer Chris Whitty said on Saturday.
“As announced on Monday, the UK has identified a new variant of Covid-19 through genomic surveillance by Public Health England,” Whitty said in a statement.
“As a result of the rapid spread of the new variant, preliminary modeling data, and rapidly increasing incidence rates in the southeast, the Advisory Group on New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats (NERVTAG) considers that the new strain can spread more quickly “.
Report by Michael Holden, edited by William Maclean