British Prime Minister Boris Johnson made a worrying one Announcement Friday on B 1.1.7, the variant of the coronavirus first found in the UK last fall and which has become widespread in the country and elsewhere. According to data recently analyzed by British scientists, B 1.1.7 is not only more transmissible than previous strains, but it can also lead to a higher risk of death. While these conclusions are still preliminary, they seem worth taking seriously.
The announcement was based on data reviewed by the New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group, or NERVTAG, an independent group of scientists who helped shape the country’s pandemic response. Last December their work B 1.1.7 congealed the consensus that the variant was more transmissible than previously circulating strains. Initially, their analysis found no evidence that B 1.1.7 caused more serious illness or death in the population than before. But that is no longer the case.
According to their new newspaper released On Friday, there are now several independent analyzes of the case data collected in recent weeks that point to the same trend: an increase in the number of people dying from B 1.1.7 compared to those infected with other strains of the virus. While the exact numbers differ between the groups, they suggest that B 1.1.7 is about 30% more likely to cause death than previous strains. Note that, while a 30% increase sounds huge, the overall death rate would still be somewhere around 1%.
“This is of course quite concerning, given the speed at which this variant has caught up with circulating tensions in various regions and our inability to control general transmission in many parts of the world,” Jason Kindrachuk, a virologist at the University of Manitoba in Canada who was not involved in the new research, told Gizmodo in an email.
Like the authors of the new article emphasize, there are limitations of their findings. The data that British scientists use to study the coronavirus is only pertinent a small fraction of the total number of cases and deaths in the country on any given day. Some data sources, such as hospital patient outcomes, also take longer to collect than others. This may explain why hospitalization data specifically does not seem to show that B.1.1.7 is more deadly – the data may not be up to date enough to find that pattern yet. It is also possible that B.1.1.7 places more people in the hospital but not necessarily change a hospitalized patient’s chances of survival.
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a possible factor that could indirectly explain why B.1.1.7 appears more deadly—Hospitals are inundated with more cases caused by a more transmissible variant – doesn’t seem to play a major role, however. One analysis, by The London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, took into account ‘hospital pressure covariables’, such as the number of hospital beds available for patients on a fan but found no substantial change in their conclusions. The increase in mortality rates was consistent across age groups, which further points to a real higher mortality risk due to B.1.1.7 alone.
S.all countries are now concerned about the emergence of B.1.1.7 and others, similar variants. Must be B.1.1.7 outside the UK, as some experts have warned, it would certainly threaten the recent reject in cases and recently seen hospital admissions in some Nations.
“My immediate thoughts, of course, the toll of this disease on our long-residents of a temporary care facility in Canada and what this variant could mean for an already precarious situation, ”said Kindrachuk. Canada, like the US, is new experienced one decrease in the number of cases and hospital admissions. But outbreaks of variants similar to B 1.1.7 already exist found in local nursing homes.
More needs to be done to confirm these findings. But regardless of the conclusions, it remains absolutely crucial to do what we can to reduce the spread of the pandemic so quickly. possible – including wearing masks, avoiding social contact indoors if possible, aand get vaccinated if you qualify.