The emergence of a variant of the CCP virus (New Coronavirus) in the UK has spread rapidly to several countries. China also discovered a variant CCP virus strain in Guangzhou yesterday (January 2), following the announcement of the first case of interest in Shanghai last month (December 2020) on the 30th.
On January 3, the Guangzhou Daily client reported that on January 2, 2021, the Guangdong Provincial CDC found a mutant strain of B.1.1.7 in the throat swab sample of a confirmed case imported from the UK, which is highly similar to the genetic sequence of the recent mutant virus from the UK.
The case was reported to be an 18-year-old male Chinese student who entered Guangzhou from the UK on December 4, 2020 and tested negative for nucleic acid upon entry; on December 18, his nucleic acid test was positive at the isolation site and subsequently confirmed; on December 27, the Guangdong Provincial CDC performed genomic sequencing analysis of the case’s throat swab sample, which initially suggested a B.1.1.7 mutant strain.
On January 2, 2021, after another review, the results showed that the sample viral gene sequence belonged to subtype B.1.1.7 and contained 13 branch-specific amino acid variant sites of the B.1.1.7 subtype mutant strain, including the S protein N501Y, which is potentially important for the virus’ ability to infect, the P681H mutation and the S protein 69-70 deletion mutation associated with the virus’ immune escape.
According to what is available, this B.1.1.7 mutant strain is more transmissible, but patient symptoms, severe disease rates, and death rates remain largely unchanged, the report said.
Previously, on Dec. 30, 2020, the CDC released a research report showing that the first confirmed case of the British variant of the CCP virus was found in Shanghai in a 23-year-old female student who arrived from the United Kingdom on Dec. 14.
The report said the case “poses a great potential threat” to China’s outbreak prevention and control efforts.
In addition to several European countries neighboring the United Kingdom, a variant of the Chinese Communist virus has been found in several Asian countries, including Japan, India, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore and Hong Kong.
According to the BBC, Axel Gandy, a professor at Imperial College London, said the new variant of the virus is the most serious mutation since the CCP virus pandemic, and that while the number of infections in the original CCP virus epidemic decreased by one-third during the UK’s November 2020 blockade, the spread of the new variant increased threefold.
Gandy revealed that the latest data show that the variant virus spreads rapidly across all age groups, with increased infection rates at different ages.
The University of London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine believes that this variant of the virus is 50-74% more infectious than the previous virus.
Recent Comments