New COVID-19 variant discovered in South Africa triggers travel ban and an anxious wait for data
Johannesburg – A potentially dangerous new strain of coronavirus alarms scientists around the world and causes governments to ban travelers from South African nations. The variant was first found in South Africa, where researchers were quick to mark it to the global health community.
As CBS News correspondent Debora Patta reports, there is serious concern among experts that the new strain could put the fight against the pandemic back.
South African officials say the variant, which has more mutations than previously detected strains that have emerged around the world, marks a major “leap in the development” of the virus since the global health crisis began two years ago.
The concern is that it may be more transmissible and or more resistant to current vaccine formulas, according to public health expert Professor Salim Abdool Karim.
“If this variant is equal to, or more transferable than Delta variant“It will be very difficult to predict that it will do anything different from what we have seen, namely that it would grow and spread around the world,” he told CBS News.
South African scientists have been working around the clock this week to determine how bad the new variant, which so far has only been referred to as B.1.1.529, really is. Laboratory results are still a few weeks away.
But despite the World Health Organization’s call for “a risk-based and scientific approach”, as it called on nations not to adopt travel restrictions yet, some countries decided not to wait for the detailed scientific analysis. Britain, France and Israel have canceled direct flights from South Africa and the surrounding nations.
So far, fewer than 100 cases of the new variant have been confirmed, mainly among young people in South Africa, who have the lowest vaccination rate in the country.
Botswana and Hong Kong also confirmed cases of travelers who had recently returned from South Africa, and on Friday Israel said three people who had also just returned from abroad were infected with the strain. One of these patients came in from Malawi, but Israeli officials did not specify where the other two had flown in from. All three had been put under mandatory isolation on Friday.
Health authorities in South Africa said the response from other countries was premature, given how little was still understood about the new tribe. Karim noted that it was only discovered thanks to South Africa’s excellent scientific monitoring of COVID-19 cases, which specifically hunt for new varieties. Few other nations have such a robust genomic sequencing program to find the strains.
“It’s true that other countries that may not have the same level of care,” he told CBS News, meaning other nations, “may have new variants like either this or others. They just do not know about it.”
Since the first coronavirus vaccines became available more than a year ago, WHO and public health experts around the world have warned that if doses are not shared with developing countries, even well-vaccinated countries will be in danger as new, potentially more dangerous varieties get the space – and unprotected human hosts – they need to evolve.
With less than 7% of the total population of the African continent vaccinated to date, there have been mounting pressure on pharmaceutical companies and the richest countries to correct the huge imbalance in vaccine distribution.
Pfizer’s partner BioNTech said on Friday that they were already studying the effectiveness of the companies’ COVID vaccine formula against the new strain.
“We expect more data from the laboratory tests in two weeks at the latest,” a BioNTech spokesman told AFP. “These data will provide more information on whether B.1.1.529 could be an escape variant that may require an adjustment of our vaccine if the variant is spread globally.”
Download our free app
For Breaking News & Analysis Download the free CBS News app
.
No comments: