The new mutation of COVID-19 found in the UK could infect more children than previous strains, according to an advisory group of government scientists.
So far, COVID-19 has mostly affected adults, but children seem just as susceptible to the new strain, which is also considered more contagious, members of the advisory group on new and emerging respiratory virus threats told reporters.
“There is some indication that it has a greater propensity to infect children,” NERVTAG member Neil Ferguson, a professor at Imperial College London, said Monday of the mutation that forced London into lockdown.
Studies over the past few weeks show that “cases of the variant under 15 were statistically significantly higher than the non-variant virus,” he said, according to the Independent.
Wendy Barclay, another NERVTAG professor and a specialist in virology, said the mutations in the new variant involve changes in the way it enters human cells, which could mean “that children may be as susceptible to this virus as adults.”
“We’re not saying this is a virus that specifically targets children,” she said, but instead it puts them “on a more level playing field” with adults in terms of contamination, The Independent said.
The mutation – VUI 202012/01 – is blamed for a massive spike in business in the wider London area, forcing the government to effectively “cancel Christmas” there, leading to a slew of nations pushing their boundaries with it. VK slam shut.
NERVTAG Chairman Peter Horby, Professor of Emerging Infectious Diseases at the University of Oxford, confirmed that experts there “now have great confidence that this variant has a transmission advantage over other virus variants currently found in the UK.”
Barclay, meanwhile, said they were not “quite sure” that the vaccines that have just been rolled out would be effective against the new variant.
That work is “currently being carried out in several labs in the UK,” she said of urgent trials, while others are being conducted in the US and by the vaccine makers themselves.
With pole wires