A new strain of COVID-19 is quickly becoming the most dominant strain in the UK.
Called “VUI-202012/01”, this new coronavirus mutation is believed to be more contagious than COVID-19, but there is no evidence that it is more deadly than COVID-19.
“Good news. One is that these mutations don’t look to have any effect on how effective the vaccine will be,” said Dr. David Engelthaler, Director of the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGEN) North in Flagstaff. “One of the mutations seems to make the spike protein fit into cell receptors more easily. It’s kind of like a better key that fits into a lock. So that makes the virus go in faster, multiply faster, and possibly transfer faster.” . “
“It may surprise people that we already have more than one strain of coronavirus that has mutated many times before,” says Dr. Ross Goldberg, director of the Arizona Medical Association. “Imagine a big LEGO set and I’m going to change some of the LEGOs in it. It may have changed some of the internal design, but the overall has not changed.”
Dr. Goldberg said the current vaccine distributed in the United States has been tested against multiple different strains, and believes the vaccine will protect against the VUI-202012/01 strain.
Virus mutations are common and Dr. Engelthaler said the current strain of COVID-19 is a mutation of the original virus that caused the pandemic.