Jersey checks test samples for new covid variant

Thursday 17 December 2020

Jersey is sending samples of some of its positive covid tests to the UK to see if any are a new mutation that "may be associated" with a spike in cases in England, Express has learned.

On Monday in Parliament, UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock announced that a new variant of corona virus had been identified, with initial analysis suggesting a faster growth than existing variants.

Following queries from Express, a Government spokesperson said: “the testing we use will pick up the variant described in the UK”, and further confirmed that Jersey is sending examples of positives for sequencing in the UK.

The variant - VUI-2020/12 - accounted for 1,108 cases in nearly 60 different UK local authorities as of 13 December, predominantly in the South East of England.

Pictured: The Government confirmed Jersey's testing would pick up the new covid variant.

However, according to microbial genomics and bioinformation Professor Nick Loman as quoted by the British Medical Journal, though the variant is “strongly associated” with areas with increasing rates of covid-19, it is only a correlation at this point.

“It’s a correlation, but we can’t say it is causation,” the Professor said. “But there is striking growth in this variant, which is why we are worried, and it needs urgent follow-up and investigation.”

Equally, there is currently no indication the new strain is more dangerous than the initial one, with the UK Health Secretary stating: “there is currently nothing to suggest that this variant is more likely to cause serious disease, and the latest clinical advice is that it’s highly unlikely that this mutation would fail to respond to a vaccine.”

Pictured: There is nothing currently to suggest that the new mutation will have any effect on the covid vaccine.

Mutations happen naturally in RNA viruses such as covid-19 - in an update about the mutation on the Covid-19 Genomics UK website, it was described how "many thousands of mutations have already arisen in the SARS-CoV-2 genome since the virus emerged in 2019."

It added: "The vast majority of the mutations observed in SARS-CoV-2 have no apparent effect on the virus and only a very small minority are likely to be important and change the virus in any appreciable way (for example, a change in the ability to infect people; cause disease of different severity; or become insensitive to the effect of the human immune response including the response generated by a vaccine)."