British Health Secretary Matt Hancock has said the new COVID-19 variant identified in South Africa is a bigger risk than the highly infectious UK variant.
“I’m incredibly worried about the South African variant, and that’s why we took the action that we did to restrict all flights from South Africa,” Hancock told BBC Radio on Monday.
“This is a very, very significant problem […] and it’s even more of a problem than the UK new variant.”
Hancock said Britain needs to tighten restrictions in some areas of the country to tackle the rapid spread of a new variant of the coronavirus after cases surged in recent weeks.
On Sunday, there were nearly 55,000 new cases and in total more than 75,000 people in the country have died with COVID-19 during the pandemic – the second-highest toll in Europe and the sixth worst in the world.
Both Britain and South Africa have discovered new variants in the coronavirus in recent months.
Meanwhile, the ITV network’s political editor, citing an unidentified scientific adviser to the British government, said scientists were not fully confident that COVID-19 vaccines would work on the new South African variant.
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UK scientists and public health officials are said to be extremely worried that a new, highly infectious strain of the coronavirus discovered in South Africa may be resistant to the current generation of vaccines.
ReplyDeleteProfessor John Bell, Regius Chair of Medicine at the University of Oxford, who helped develop one of the leading vaccines against the disease, said he is more concerned about the South African mutation than the widely feared strain that emanated from Kent in the UK and triggered major travel restrictions around the globe.
“The mutations associated with the South African form are really pretty substantial changes in the structure of the protein,” Bell told Times Radio. “My gut feeling is the vaccine will be still effective against the Kent strain. I don’t know about the South African strain – there’s a big question mark about that.”