Tag Archives: Mutated virus

Shaken by new coronavirus strain, world shuts the door on Britain

By Gerhard Mey and Ben Makori

DOVER, England (Reuters) – Several countries closed their borders to Britain on Monday over fears of a highly infectious new coronavirus strain, causing travel chaos and raising the prospect of food shortages just days before the UK is set to leave the European Union.

India, Pakistan, Poland, Spain, Switzerland, Sweden, Russia, Jordan and Hong Kong suspended travel for Britons after Prime Minister Boris Johnson warned a mutated variant of the virus, up to 70% more transmissible, had been identified in the country. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Oman closed their borders completely.

Several other nations blocked travel from Britain over the weekend, including France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Austria, Ireland, Belgium and Canada – although experts said the strain may already be circulating in countries with less advanced detection methods than the United Kingdom.

The discovery of the new strain, just months before vaccines are expected to be widely available, sowed fresh panic in a pandemic that has killed about 1.7 million people worldwide and more than 67,000 in Britain.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo urged the U.S. government to take steps to prevent the variant entering the country, which has been worst hit by COVID-19 with almost 318,000 deaths.

“It’s high time the federal government takes swift action, because today that variant is getting on a plane and landing in JFK, and all it takes is one person,” he said.

U.S. Assistant Health Secretary Brett Giroir said nothing had yet been decided on any travel ban. As the pandemic accelerates there, Congress was poised to vote on a $900 billion COVID-19 stimulus package, after months of inaction.

EU officials met via video link to coordinate their response to the new strain of the coronavirus. The bloc is on course to start COVID-19 vaccinations within a week after its medicines regulator approved the use of a shot from Pfizer and BioNTech on Monday.

Experts said there was no evidence that vaccines would not protect against this variant, but added they were working around the clock to determine whether the mutations would affect how well the shots guarded against infection.

“Since the three vaccine forerunners target the spike protein, how the variant responds to the vaccines and the protection that the vaccine will offer does still need to be examined in detail,” said Saad Shakir, a professor and director at Britain’s drug safety research unit.

FOOD SHORTAGES WARNING

France shut its border to arrivals of people and trucks from Britain, closing off one of the most important trade arteries with mainland Europe.

“No driver wants to deliver to the UK now, so the UK is going to see its freight supply dry up,” France’s FNTR national road-haulage federation said.

As families and truck drivers tried to navigate the travel bans to get back home in time for Christmas, British supermarket chain Sainsbury’s said shortages would start to appear within days if transport ties were not quickly restored.

“If nothing changes, we will start to see gaps over the coming days on lettuce, some salad leaves, cauliflowers, broccoli and citrus fruit – all of which are imported from the continent at this time of year,” Sainsbury’s said.

The global alarm was reflected in financial markets.

European shares slumped, with travel and leisure stocks bearing the brunt; British Airways-owner IAG and easyJet dropped about 7%, while Air France KLM lost around 3%.

Wall Street also felt the pain, with losses across the board. The S&P 1500 airlines index slid 3%, while leading cruise operators fell about 4%.

The British pound tumbled 2.5% against the dollar at one point before paring some of the losses, while the yield on two-year UK government bonds hit a record low.

‘SICK MAN OF EUROPE’

Johnson cancelled Christmas plans for millions of British people on Saturday due to the more infectious strain of the coronavirus, though he said there was no evidence that it was either more lethal or caused a more severe illness.

Britain’s tabloids bemoaned the crisis.

“Sick Man of Europe,” the Daily Mirror newspaper said on its front page beside a picture of Johnson, while the Sun newspaper said “French show no merci.”

The new variant and restrictions in Britain compound the chaos as the country prepares to finally part ways with the European Union, possibly without a trade deal, when the Brexit transition period at 2300 GMT on Dec. 31.

Talks on a Brexit trade deal were due to continue on Monday.

The new variant, which scientists said was 40%-70% more transmissible, is rapidly become the dominant strain in parts of southern England, including London.

Experts tracking the new strain said there was some early but unconfirmed evidence that it could transmit as readily among children as among adults, unlike previous dominant strains that appeared to be more easily able to infect adults.

‘2020 NOT DONE WITH US’

Cases of the new strain have also been detected in some other countries, including Denmark, Italy and the Netherlands.

Australia said two people who travelled from the United Kingdom to New South Wales, its most populous state, were carrying the mutated virus. It axed dozens of domestic flights while New South Wales locked down more than 250,000 people.

“2020 is not done with us yet,” Prime Minister Scott Morrison said.

Some scientists said the prevalence discovered in Britain might be down to detection.

“Britain is simply the country which finds these mutations the most because they are looking for them more. There are countries that hardly search or do not search at all,” Marc Van Ranst, a virologist from the Rega Institute for Medical Research in Belgium, told broadcaster VRT.

“I think we will find in the coming days that a lot of other countries will find it.”

(Additional reporting by Kate Kelland, Toby Melville and James Davey in London, Laurence Frost in Paris, Philip Blenkinsop in Brussels, Sayantani Ghosh in Singapore, Frank McGurty in New York, Josh Smith and Sangmi Cha in Seoul, Renju Jose in Sydney, Shilpa Jamkhandikar in Mumbai and Farah Master in Hong Kong; Writing by Guy Faulconbridge and Pravin Char; Editing by Alison Williams and Mike Collett-White)

Moderna vaccine is second to exceed expectations; mutated virus may be more vulnerable to new vaccines

By Nancy Lapid

(Reuters) – The following is a roundup of some of the latest scientific studies on the novel coronavirus and efforts to find treatments and vaccines for COVID-19, the illness caused by the virus.

Vaccine from Moderna is second to exceed expectations in pivotal trial

Moderna Inc’s experimental vaccine was 94.5% effective in preventing COVID-19 based on interim data from a late-stage trial, the company said on Monday. That followed last week’s news that Pfizer Inc’s vaccine was also more than 90% effective based on initial data. Pending more safety data and regulatory review, the United States could have two vaccines authorized for emergency use in December. Both vaccines employ synthetic messenger RNA (mRNA), which coaxes cells to make certain virus proteins that the immune system sees as a threat and mounts a response against. Moderna’s trial involved 30,000 racially diverse U.S. adults, including people at high risk for severe COVID-19. Only five of the 95 COVID-19 cases in the initial analysis occurred in participants who received the vaccine, while the rest had received a placebo. The vaccine, administered in two shots 28 days apart, also appeared to prevent cases of severe COVID-19. Side effects, largely occurring after the second shot, included muscle aches, fever, headache and redness at the injection site. Moderna’s vaccine does not need ultra-cold storage like Pfizer’s, making it easier to distribute. Moderna expects it to be stable at normal refrigerator temperatures of 2 to 8 degrees Celsius (36 to 48°F) for 30 days and can be stored for up to 6 months at -20C.

Mutated virus may be more vulnerable to new vaccines

The mutated form of the new coronavirus that is now the most common strain worldwide is more infectious but may also be more vulnerable to vaccines under development, new research suggests. In experiments reported on Thursday in Science, researchers saw that the newer strain, which originated in Europe, is more efficient at infecting airway cells and at making copies of itself, although it does not appear to produce more severe illness. The D614G mutation causes a “flap” to open on the tip of a spike on the surface of the virus, improving its ability to break into cells, but also creating a pathway for antibodies in vaccines to enter the virus and disable it, the researchers explained in a statement. New SARS-CoV-2 mutations are continually emerging, “like the recently discovered mink SARS-CoV-2 cluster 5 variant in Denmark that also encodes D614G,” coauthor Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina School of Medicine said in the statement. “We must continue to track and understand the consequences of these new mutations on disease severity, transmission, host range and vulnerability to vaccine-induced immunity,” he added.

Paper forms pose coronavirus risk for lab staff

When laboratory personnel are processing COVID-19 tests, there is a small risk that the paper forms accompanying the specimens can be contaminated with the new coronavirus, a new report cautions. Researchers at the Birmingham Public Health Laboratory in the UK analyzed randomly selected paper forms and specimen packaging during a period when the team was processing about 700 COVID-19 tests daily. Of the 37 items they tested, one piece of paperwork carried genetic material from the coronavirus. The form had come from a low-risk hospital ward, and the specimen from the patient was negative for the virus, “indicating contamination may be occurring as a result of environmental or healthcare worker contamination,” the researchers wrote on Thursday in the Journal of Hospital Infection. They call for “stringent laboratory practices” – hand hygiene, appropriate personal protective equipment – and “use of electronic test requesting where possible.”

(Reporting by Nancy Lapid, Julie Steenhuysen and Michael Erman; Editing by Bill Berkrot)