Chief Scientist of the World Health Organization (WHO), Soumya Swaminathan, on January 12, 2020 in Geneva.
FABRICE COFFRINI | AFP via Getty Images
World Health Organization officials said Monday that the coronavirus is mutating “at a much slower pace” than seasonal flu, even as UK officials announced this weekend that a new mutation in the virus it allows it to spread more easily.
Seasonal flu mutates so often that scientists must regularly develop new vaccines to inoculate the population against the virus each year. UK officials have told the WHO that vaccines against Covid-19 appear to be just as effective against the new strain, but more research is needed. While all viruses mutate naturally, not all mutations make a virus more contagious or more virulent.
“SARS-CoV-2 is mutating at a much slower rate than the flu,” Soumya Swaminathan, chief scientist at WHO, told a news conference. “And so far, although we have seen several changes and several mutations, none has had a significant impact on the susceptibility of the virus to any of the therapies, drugs or vaccines currently under development, and this is expected to continue “.
WHO officials reiterated that UK officials have said the new variant could be up to 70% more transmissible than the original strain of the virus. Dr Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO health emergency program, said it was unclear whether the increase in the spread in the UK was due to mutation or human behavior.
“We’ve seen an estimate of a small increase in reproductive numbers by the UK,” he said, which means the virus is spreading faster, which could mean it’s more contagious or spreading more easily in colder months. It could also mean that people relax in following public health protocols. “It remains to be seen how much of this is due to the specific genetic change of the new variant. I suspect there is.”
Maria Van Kerkhove, head of the WHO’s emerging disease and zoonosis unit, said UK officials estimate the mutation has led to an increase in the virus’s reproductive rate from 1.1 to 1.5. This means that it is estimated that each person infected with the variant infects 1.5 more people, compared to 1.1 when infected with the original variant.
He added that officials are investigating three elements of the new variant. He said scientists are studying whether it spreads more easily, whether it causes more or less serious diseases, and how the antibody responds to an infection. Van Kerkhove and others stressed that there does not appear to be any impact on the effectiveness of Covid vaccines in the new variant.