‘That’s just a claim’: Top German virologist casts doubt on fears of new ‘highly contagious’ UK Covid-19 strain — RT World News

 

News of a supposedly highly infectious coronavirus strain being discovered in the UK has led to a flurry of travel bans. Now, a top German scientist says the mutation might not be as dangerous as we were led to believe.

The statement that the new strain of Covid-19 is 70 percent more contagious is nothing, but a claim made by politicians so far, Christian Drosten, the head of the virology department at the Berlin’s Charite center — one of Europe’s largest university hospitals — told the German radio broadcaster Deutschlandfunk.

“Suddenly, there is this figure out there, 70 percent, and no one even knows what is meant by that,” he said. The virologist believes there is just not enough data to really say that the new strain is any more dangerous than the other existing ones.

The data provided by the British scientists on the new strain is still incomplete, Drosten said, adding that even preliminary analysis results would arrive within a week. The fact that discovery of a new strain coincided with a sharp rise of new infection cases in southeast England also does not necessarily mean that the new virus is to blame, the virologist believes.

“The question is … whether the virus is to blame or whether it was just a local epidemic outbreak, or the lockdown was not so strict … and transmission mechanisms were in place … in an area where this particular strain happened to be,” he said.

It was also too early to say whether this virus actually transmits faster. To do so, one needs to “look at who infected whom and how long it took,” Drosten explained, adding that “one would be surprised” if such a parameter as the virus infectiousness would significantly change all of a sudden now.

What is known so far is that a mutation present in the new strain lets it form a stronger binding with human cells. Still, according to Drosten, that does not automatically mean quicker reproduction since the virus stays with one cell for a longer period of time than it could and probably should to successfully replicate.....RT

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