UK confirms two Covid-19 variants, praises SA geneticists

Britain has imposed an immediate ban on travel to and from South Africa, following the discovery of two cases of the mutant variation of Covid-19 which came in with people arriving from this country.

In a briefing yesterday afternoon, UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock said that any person who had arrived in the UK from South Africa in the past 14 days “must quarantine immediately”.

He added: “By quarantine, I mean they must restrict contact with any other person whatsoever.

“We’ll be changing the law to give this legal effect imminently.”

Hancock said “these measures are temporary while we investigate this new strain” which is to be analysed at the country’s Porton Down chemical and biological weapons research facility.

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He said that as part of the UK’s constant surveillance on the virus and the “impressive genomic capability of the South Africans”, they had identified cases among contacts of people who had arrived in the UK in the past two weeks.

Within the last day, he said, British experts had met their South African counterparts and “we are incredibly grateful to the South African government for the rigour of their science and the openness and transparency with which they have rightly acted as we did when we discovered we had a new variant here.”

Last Friday, South African Health Minister Dr Zweli Mkhize revealed that the rapidly accelerating second wave of Covid-19 cases in this country is being driven by a new variant of the coronavirus which spreads faster and will bring more cases than the first wave of the pandemic.

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Later reports suggested that a very similar variant had been identified in the UK, and later there was confirmation that the two variants had developed independently of each other.

Hancock’s announcement yesterday confirms that there are two different variants.

South Africa’s top advisor on the pandemic, Professor Salim Abdool Karim, said the second wave has now hit all provinces in this country, “with some early signs of it spreading faster than the first wave.”

He said, however, that it was “not clear if this second wave has more or less deaths.

“We have not seen any red flags looking at our current death information”.

Although Mkhize and his experts said there was no reason for panic, because the current diagnostic and treatment protocols were as effective as they were with the variants in the first wave, the harsh methods proposed by the UK authorities indicate that there may be growing concern in both countries about not only the speed at which the variant spreads, but also about its potential lethality.

This brings into question the commitment made last week by Mkhize that the scientific advisors would not recommend to the government to implement any further lockdown restrictions.

– news@citizen.co.za

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