Over a year into the COVID-19 pandemic, billions of people have now been vaccinated. But with the spread of the Delta variant causing cases to rise and the World Health Organisation (WHO) investigating over 15 further variants around the world, the COVID-19 pandemic is far from over.
The C.1.2 variant, discovered by South African scientists, raised concerns among the locals as they voiced concerns about its quick mutation and its potential to evade vaccine protection.
Most recently, the International Health Organisation, in its weekly COVID epidemiological report published last Tuesday, stated that the World Health Organisation (WHO) was monitoring a new COVID-19 variant called ‘mu,’ which the agency also said had mutations that has the potential to evade immunity provided by the previous infection as well as vaccination.
Is this something that we need to be worried about?
The new coronavirus mutation (C.1.2) was discovered back in May and is now spreading in most South African provinces and has also been detected in several countries including England, China and Portugal. It is believed that C.1.2. has multiple mutations and could possibly overcome vaccine immunity to what extent if any, is still unknown.
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Gerald Evans, an infectious disease specialist, states that at this point, there is no need to worry. “What I would say ‘bottom line’ is, anything about C.1.2. at this point is speculation, we do not know where it is going. Plus, it does not appear to be out-competing the Delta variant.”
South African researchers recently published their findings in a pre-print that still has to undergo a peer review but online some experts are tweeting about it. Eric Ding, who’s with the Federation of American Scientists, posted a thread about his concerns over C.1.2’s mutation rights, saying that it was more mutations away from the original virus than any other variant detected worldwide.
Gerald however opposed that notion, saying, “Looking at the pre-print document that came out from South Africa, I’m of the opinion that there’s a lot of speculation about what these mutations mean, because we do not know if some of them necessarily confer any advantage to these virus or not.”
Toronto epidemiologist, Ross Upshur, also supported Gerald’s claim as he also urges everyone to be calm. “I think we need to get accustomed to hearing periodically about new variants.”
According to the Centre for Disease Control in Europe, there are dozens of mutations being tracked as we speak. Right now there are 5 variants ‘of concern including Delta, Beta and Alpha, 6 variants ‘of interest’ including lambda and kappa and a long list of variants that are being monitored including C.1.2 and MU.
Tikki Pang from the National University of Singapore states that “there could be a little bit of delay before the MU variant spreads to the other parts of the World. But for me it’s really just a matter of time as we have seen with the Delta variant. In terms of how fast, we’ll have to wait and see.”
Upshur is of the opinion that scientists (like in 2020) are coming together like never before. He went further to explain that currently, there’s huge sequencing capacity and more interestingly in South Africa because all of the research they have been doing in HIV/AIDS has really remarkably advanced and made robust genomic sequencing capacity as does the UK and the US. And now they are creating a global network of sequencing, thus as that expands into all parts of the world, we are going to start to see more and more variants emerging.
“This is evolution in action; this is natural selection in action. When we start to get on top of the virus, the virus through random mutations finds ways around whatever mechanism we find to stop its spread,” Upshur states.
Why should we be concerned about these variants?
Research has revealed that viruses naturally do not want to necessarily kill their hosts quickly. The reason is because they want to reproduce as much as they can and spread. Thus, if they kill their hosts quickly, then they can’t spread and that was the major reason that the original SARS curve did not go far around the world as compared with this second version of SARS curve. The idea thus leans on the fact that even if it is more transmissible, it is definitely more dangerous because it just means that more people get it and ultimately the statistics translate it as more deaths in the medium term. Hence, these variants must be monitored more closely.
What does this mean for vaccines?
Pang in an interview stated that it was much too early to determine. He however stated, Perhaps the bigger concern is not so much resistance to vaccines but; is it going to spread more rapidly than the Delta variant? And also whether it is going to cause more disease severity.
What about countries that plan to live with the virus endemically?
Pang indicated that he did not think that the new variant would have a major impact on countries that have plans to deal with the virus in terms of endemicity. He however stated that what he had observed so far with other variants and their existing vaccines was that they may be a bit ‘less effective,’ but there is no evidence indicating that the new variants would be totally resistant to existing vaccines. “Plans would continue with regards to vaccination coverage and more importantly to make provisions and capacity to monitor the variants as and when they appear,” he said.
“This means the capacity to sequence isolates in each individual country to get a very early warning in terms of whether these mutants would start appearing,” he said.
What precautions should be taken as new variants continue to emerge?
Pang stated that every country must continue with existing and proven public health interventions (in addition to vaccination). Thus, continued mask wearing, continued safe distancing, and continued avoidance of crowded gatherings as well as all the other standard precautions should be religiously adhered to.
While it is unknown if C.1.2 and MU would be a threat just yet, experts however are of the opinion that the variants need to be closely monitored. However, at this point there does not appear to be any cases in Nigeria or its immediate neighbouring countries.
