LONDON (Reuters) – A new variant of the rapidly spreading coronavirus in Britain is carrying mutations that could mean children are just as likely to become infected as adults, unlike previous strains, scientists said on Monday.
According to reporters on the latest findings, scientists from the government’s new and emerging respiratory virus threat advisory group (NERVTAG), which are tracking the variant, said it had quickly become the dominant strain south of Gran Brittany and he could soon do the same across the country. .
“We are now very confident that this variant has a transmission advantage over other virus variants that currently exist in the UK,” said Peter Horby, Professor of Emerging Infectious Diseases at Oxford University and President of NERVTAG.
“There is an indication that he has a greater propensity to infect children,” said Neil Ferguson, a professor and epidemiologist of infectious diseases at Imperial College London and a member of NERVTAG.
“We haven’t established any kind of causation about this, but we can see it in the data,” Ferguson said. “We’ll have to collect more data to see how it behaves in the future.”
The emergence of the mutated SARS-CoV-2 variant, which scientists say is up to 70% more transmissible than previous strains in the UK, has motivated some countries to close their borders with Britain and pushed large areas of the country to severely restrict the Christmas period.
Wendy Barclay, another NERVTAG professor and specialist in virology at Imperial, said that among the mutations in the new variant are changes in the way it enters human cells, which could mean that “children , perhaps, they are just as susceptible to this virus as adults ”.
“So given their mixing patterns, more children are expected to be infected,” Barclay said.