Experts call it the ‘double mutant’.
And the new variant of the coronavirus raises alarm, even among those who have followed the most disturbing development of the pandemic.
The dual mutant strain has emerged in India – where it is partly to blame for a record thrust in COVID-19 cases – and has now been detected in California. The variant has two worrying mutations in the ear protein of the virus, E484Q and L452R, which make it possible to hold the cells more efficiently and infect them.
In other words, they can make this stress even more contagious than others.
“It looks like it’s getting the keys to really reproduce or break loose,” said Dr. David Cennimo, an infectious disease expert at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School.
He calls the variant ‘potentially more serious’.
‘I think it’s worrying when you look at it and say,’ Oh, it looks like something that has the potential to really spread through multiple treatments or multiple pathways, ” Cennimo said, ‘where you have a patient who has more is contagious, you may have a virus that is harder to neutralize antibodies.
“But on the other hand, I feel like that was obviously the thing that’s going to happen.”
Viruses mutate. And the new coronavirus is definitely continuing it.
In New Jersey, the tribe of the United Kingdom (B.1.1.7) poses the greatest threat among the variants. This is one of the factors causing a third wave in the pandemic. The state reported 827 cases of worrying variants – 806 involved the British tribe.
The fear is that the new variant with double mutations is more contagious and that vaccines may be less effective.
The E484Q mutation is closely related to one found in the Brazilian, New York and South African variants, and the L452R mutation is also found in a California tribe.
Experts have warned that we are in a race between vaccines and the variants. The longer the virus spreads among those who have not yet been vaccinated, the greater the chance that it will mutate into a strain that can render vaccines ineffective.
According to the state panel, nearly 5 million doses of vaccines have been administered in New Jersey. Nearly 2 million people have been completely vaccinated. But that means millions of adults – and every child under the age of 16 – have yet to be vaccinated.
The concern is not the number of mutations in the coronavirus, but the type of changes.
“The variant is once again highly transmissible and appears to be less susceptible to existing antibodies and has been linked to immune flight,” said Dr. David Perlin, chief scientific officer and senior vice president of the Center for Discovery and Innovation at Hackensack Meridian Health, said.
But will this new strain make vaccines less effective?
“That’s the concern,” Perlin said. ‘The question is, is it? I’m not sure. I mean, we did not see the vaccine data that would suggest otherwise. ”
Other experts – also in the California Bay Area, where the variant was detected – said the current vaccines should provide protection against the new strain.
The threat to New Jersey remains unclear, as it is unknown whether the double mutant variant is spreading in the Garden State. The British, Brazilian, South African, New York and two tribes in California were discovered here, despite the fact that the state examined only 2% of the positive PCR tests to determine the genetic composition of the virus.
“I think all of us assume that these viruses are moving a lot,” Perlin said.
Researchers from the Hackensack Meridian Center for Discovery and Innovation recently developed a test that can detect several variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in less than three hours.
At the moment, the test is aimed at the three variants that cause the most concern: the British, Brazilian and South African tribes.
But Perlin said the test is so flexibly designed that it can be customized to detect new variants as it emerges.
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Spencer Kent can be reached at [email protected].