The race against the virus that causes COVID-19 has taken a new turn: mutations appear quickly, and the longer it takes to vaccinate people, the more likely it is that a variant will appear that can evade current tests, treatments, and vaccines. .
The coronavirus is increasingly genetically diversified and health officials say the high rate of new cases is the main reason. Each new infection gives the virus a chance to mutate as it makes copies of itself, threatening to undo the progress made so far to control the pandemic.
On Friday, the World Health Organization urged more efforts to detect new variants. U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said a new version first identified in the United Kingdom could become dominant in the United States in March. While it does not cause more serious illnesses, it will lead to more hospitalizations and deaths because it spreads much more easily, the CDC said, warning of “a new phase of exponential growth.”
“We take it very seriously,” Dr. said Sunday. Anthony Fauci, the U.S. government’s top infectious disease expert, on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
“We have to do everything we can now … to get as low a transmission as we can,” said Dr. Michael Mina of Harvard University. “The best way to prevent mutant strains from appearing is to slow down transmission.”
To date, vaccines appear to remain effective, but there are indications that some of the new mutations may undermine virus testing and reduce the effectiveness of antibody drugs as treatments.
“We’re in a race against time” because the virus “can stumble upon a mutation” that makes it more dangerous, said Dr. Pardis Sabeti, an evolutionary biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.
Younger people may be less willing to wear masks, shun crowds, and take other steps to prevent infection, because the current strain doesn’t seem to do them much harm, but “in a mutational change, it can be.” , he warned. Sabeti documented a change in the Ebola virus during the 2014 outbreak that made it much worse.
MUTATIONS TO INCREASE
It is normal for viruses to acquire small changes or mutations in their genetic alphabet as they reproduce. Those that help the virus flourish give it a competitive advantage and therefore eliminate other versions.
In March, just a couple of months after the discovery of the coronavirus in China, a mutation called D614G emerged that caused it to spread further. It soon became the dominant version in the world.
Now, after months of relative calm, “we’ve begun to see an amazing evolution” of the virus, biologist Trevor Bedford of the Seattle Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center wrote on Twitter last week. “The fact that we’ve seen three variants of concern appear since September suggests that more are likely to come.”
One first identified himself in the United Kingdom and quickly became dominant in some parts of England. It has now been reported in at least 30 countries, including the United States.
Shortly afterwards, South Africa and Brazil reported new variants, and the main mutation of the version identified in Britain appeared in a different version “circulating in Ohio … at least as early as September,” Drs. . Dan Jones, a molecular pathologist at Ohio State University who announced this finding last week.
“The important finding here is that it is unlikely to be related to travel,” and may instead reflect the virus acquiring similar mutations independently as more infections occur, Jones said.
This also suggests that travel restrictions may be ineffective, Mina said. Because the United States has so many cases, “we can generate our own variants as bad or worse” as those in other countries, he said.
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TREATMENT, VACCINE, RISKS OF REINFECTION
Some laboratory tests suggest that variants identified in South Africa and Brazil may be less susceptible to antibody drugs or convalescent plasma, antibody-rich blood from COVID-19 survivors, which help people fight the virus.
Government scientists are “actively studying” this possibility, Dr. Janet Woodcock of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration told reporters Thursday. The government is encouraging the development of multi-antibody treatments instead of single-antibody drugs to have more ways to target the virus in case someone turns out to be ineffective, he said.
Many scientists say that current vaccines induce broad enough immune responses that they must continue to be effective. Sufficient genetic change may require a modification of the vaccine formula, but “it will probably be on the order of years if we use the vaccine well instead of months,” Dr. Andrew Pavia of the University of Utah said Thursday. a webcast organized by the Society of Infectious Diseases of America.
Health officials are also worried that if the virus changes enough, people could get COVID-19 a second time. Reinfection is currently uncommon, but Brazil has already confirmed a case in someone with a new variant who had been ill with an earlier version several months earlier.
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WHAT TO DO
“We’re seeing a lot of variants, viral diversity, because there are a lot of viruses,” and reducing new infections is the best way to stop it, said Dr. Adam Lauring, an infectious disease expert at the University of Michigan. in Ann Arbor.
Loyce Pace, who heads the nonprofit World Health Council and is a member of COVID-19 advisory committee to President-elect Joe Biden, said the same precautions scientists have been advising all along “still work and still matter”.
“We still want people to be masking themselves,” he said Thursday in a webcast hosted by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
“We still need people to just meet people from outside their homes. We still need people to wash their hands and be really vigilant about these public health practices, especially when these variants appear. ”
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AP medical writer Carla K. Johnson in Seattle contributed to the reports.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department is supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.