This country’s leading Infectious Disease Specialist, Dr. Jerrol Thompson, while appearing as a guest on VC3’s Roundtable Talk last week, discussed the new variant of the coronavirus that has been on the rise in Southern England.
“This is a new variant, it’s purported to be probably spread a little bit more easily, but it hasn’t given any indication that it causes more severe illness or so” Thompson said.
Dr. Thompson said that this strain of the coronavirus has not been seen in any other location, beside Southern England.
He went on to discuss the differences between this new variant of the virus and the coronavirus that we are familiar with.
“How different it is to the coronavirus that we’ve been seeing all the time? We know that there have been a number of mutations and so there are always mild, small mutations taking place. The degree of this mutation is something that is still being looked at, but they have been able to recognise that it is a mutation.”
The new variant was first detected in September. In November, around a quarter of cases in London were from the new variant. This reached nearly two-thirds of cases in mid-December, according to a report in the BBC. The United Kingdom announced a surprise lockdown on Saturday in London and parts of the country amid a surge in the cases of the coronavirus disease after the discovery of a new strain of the Sars-CoV-2 virus, which causes Covid-19. According to experts, the new strain is 70% more infectious than other strains of the virus. It is believed that most of the new cases in the country are driven by this variant, with up to 60% of the cases in London being caused by it.
