Tag Archives: UK variant

UK variant of COVID-19 is now most common strain in United States: CDC

By Susan Heavey and Carl O’Donnell

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The highly contagious variant of COVID-19 first discovered in the United Kingdom has become the most common strain of the virus in the United States as cases continue to climb, a top U.S. health official said on Wednesday.

The strain, known as B.1.1.7, was identified in Britain last fall and has since been detected in 52 jurisdictions in the United States, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky told reporters at a White House briefing.

U.S. public health officials have urged Americans to get vaccinated as soon as possible in part to prevent new variants of the novel coronavirus from spreading.

The United States has also detected cases of a variant first discovered in South Africa that is thought to be resistant to some COVID-19 vaccines and treatments. That strain has been found in 36 U.S. jurisdictions, according to federal data last updated on Tuesday.

The United States is administering about 3 million COVID-19 vaccine doses per day on average over the past week, up 8% over the previous seven-day average, Walensky said.

Vaccine supply has increased significantly in the United States in recent weeks as Johnson & Johnson has begun making millions of doses of its recently authorized shots. Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna have also recently boosted their vaccine production capacity.

Still, daily U.S. cases of novel coronavirus are averaging 63,000 over the past seven days, up 2.3% from the previous seven-day average, Walensky said.

Walensky said that the CDC has identified a number of COVID-19 outbreaks tied to youth sporting events and that communities experiencing high case counts should avoid holding such events. Testing should also happen twice a week, she said.

White House COVID-19 adviser Andy Slavitt also told reporters that the U.S. government is expanding its community health center program, which it set up in recent weeks to help get vaccines into underserved communities.

(Reporting by Susan Heavey, Jeff Mason and Carl O’Donnell; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)

UK variant not causing worse illness in children; COVID-19 breath test shows promise

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.

UK variant not causing worse illness in children

The coronavirus variant first identified in the UK does not cause more severe disease in children than variants circulating earlier in 2020, new data suggest. Doctors at King’s College Hospital in London compared 20 children hospitalized for COVID-19 during the pandemic’s first wave and 60 hospitalized during the second wave, when most infections were caused by the new variant. While more children were hospitalized in the second wave, “this might be due to the higher prevalence of SARS-CoV-2” at the time, study leader Dr. Atul Gupta said. The number of adult patients also increased in the second wave, he noted. Hospitalized children in both waves had similar ages, rates of underlying medical conditions, socioeconomic status and other risk factors, the researchers reported in The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health. In both periods, few needed oxygen therapy or mechanical ventilation. Those were actually needed less often in the second wave, Gupta said. “We have found no evidence of more severe disease having occurred in children and young people during the second wave,” he concluded, “suggesting that infection with the B.1.1.7 variant does not result in an appreciably different clinical course” in this age group.

COVID-19 breath test shows promise in study

A commercially available electronic “nose” manufactured by Dutch company Breathomix can tell when a person does not have COVID-19 and would be a useful screening tool, researchers have found. They studied more than 4,500 individuals who came to coronavirus test facilities in The Netherlands between August and December 2020. First, using breath samples from a small subset of those individuals, they taught the “eNose” what a breath profile of a COVID-19 patient looks like, “comparable with how your nose can distinguish the smell of coffee from the smell of tea,” said study leader Dr. Geert Groeneveld of Leiden University Medical Center. Later, the device was able to reliably rule out infection – with or without symptoms – in 70% to 75% of all individuals tested, with results available within seconds. In cases in which the eNose cannot reliably rule out the virus, patients can undergo traditional throat-swabbing tests. The study results, posted on Tuesday on medRxiv ahead of peer review, “demonstrate that in a scenario where eNose is used as a screening test, this can reduce the number of throat and nasopharyngeal swabs,” Groeneveld said, “which in turn can reduce the burden on individuals, economy and healthcare.”

Protective antibodies detectable in dried blood spots

Researchers at Northwestern University have developed a laboratory test for measuring neutralizing antibodies against the coronavirus that requires only a single drop of blood, collected and dried on filter paper. “Blood samples can be self-collected at home, and sent to the lab in the mail,” said Thomas McDade, whose team described the technique in a report posted on Tuesday on medRxiv ahead of peer review. Currently, to determine if someone has the neutralizing antibodies that protect against the virus that causes COVID-19, blood must be drawn at a clinic or doctor’s office and sent for analysis. The Northwestern test “produces results that are comparable to results from venous blood, and the protocol can be implemented in a short amount of time with widely available laboratory infrastructure,” McDade said. “This method allows for large-scale testing of neutralizing antibodies against COVID-19, which may be useful for evaluating the effectiveness of vaccines and the level of protective immunity in the general population.” The researchers have not yet used their test to look for neutralizing antibodies against emerging variants. “We can modify the test for specific variants as needed,” McDade said.

Zinc, vitamin C show no benefit in randomized trial

In adults with COVID-19 who were not sick enough to be hospitalized, high doses of zinc or vitamin C, or both, failed to improve their symptoms or speed their recovery, researchers reported on Friday in JAMA Network Open. They randomly assigned 214 patients to 10 days of treatment with either a high dose of zinc, vitamin C, both, or neither. Everyone also received standard supportive treatments from their healthcare providers. There was no significant difference between the groups in the number of days required to reach a 50% reduction in symptoms like fever, cough, shortness of breath, and fatigue. There was also no difference in the number of days until patients no longer had severe symptoms, in need for other prescribed medications, or in rates of hospitalizations and deaths. Zinc and vitamin C (ascorbic acid) supplements “cannot be recommended” to ease the course of COVID-19 in outpatients, the researchers concluded. “Most consumers of ascorbic acid and zinc are taking significantly lower doses of these supplements, so demonstrating that even high-dose ascorbic acid and zinc had no benefit suggests clear lack of efficacy,” they said.

(Reporting by Nancy Lapid; Editing by Bill Berkrot)

Overflowing Czech hospitals seek patient transfers as ‘UK variant’ rages

By Robert Muller

NACHOD, Czech Republic (Reuters) – Jan Mach had coped with his eastern Czech district hospital’s COVID-19 wards filling up – until 22 new arrivals on Monday alone were too much and he had to seek outside help.

On Wednesday, ambulances took 15 patients to hospitals as much as 230 km (140 miles) away, as closer ones were also packed.

“We have been close to our ceiling in the past 14 days, we have touched it several times,” director Mach said, adding the 339-bed hospital had 120 COVID-19 patients. “On Monday alone we took in 22 patients and that was beyond our means.”

Nachod and Trutnov, neighboring districts on the Polish border 150 km east of Prague, are among several regions that have seen incessant spread of the disease, despite a national lockdown.

A new, more infectious variant of the virus first detected in Britain is the likely reason – data from January showed between 45% and 60% of new patients were infected with the UK variant.

On Friday, the region of 550,000 reported just four free beds in COVID-19 wards and eight in high dependency and intensive care units (ICUs) treating coronavirus patients.

“We are taking in patients in a more serious condition and younger patients, I mean born 1970 and later, we had not seen that in the autumn,” Mach said.

Patients who would normally be treated in high-dependency units or ICU have had to be given therapies such as high-flow oxygen on normal wards due to the shortage of beds.

Mach spoke minutes after overseeing another ICU patient being transferred to another hospital. Staff dressed in full-body protective gear pushed the trolley past piles of equipment boxes, one of them with the hand-written label “body bags.”

The Czech Republic has ranked among the European countries worst-hit by the pandemic. Only Portugal has reported more new cases per capita in the past two weeks, according to the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC).

As of Friday morning, the country of 10.7 million had reported 17,902 COVID-19 related deaths.

Still, the parliament voted on Thursday not to extend a national state of emergency, which will lift some of current lockdown measures including the closure of shops, a loosely policed ban on gatherings and a night-time curfew.

Petr Stepanek, chief surgeon in the resuscitation unit at Nachod hospital, said the situation was “very tense”.

“It is about the ‘British’ variant,” Stepanek said. “If a majority of the population has already had it, thank God. If not, then the situation can become very dramatic.”

(Reporting by Robert Muller; Writing by Jan Lopatka; Editing by Alex Richardson)

British PM says new variant may carry higher risk of death

By Michael Holden and Alistair Smout

LONDON (Reuters) – British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said on Friday the new English variant of COVID-19 may be associated with a higher level of mortality although he said evidence showed that both vaccines being used in the country are effective against it.

“We’ve been informed today that in addition to spreading more quickly, it also now appears that there is some evidence that the new variant – the variant that was first discovered in London and the southeast (of England) – may be associated with a higher degree of mortality,” he told a news briefing.

The warning about the higher risk of death from the new variant, which was identified in England late last year, came as a fresh blow after the country had earlier been buoyed by news the number of new COVID-19 infections was estimated to be shrinking by as much as 4% a day.

Johnson said however that all the current evidence showed both vaccines remained effective against old and new variants.

Data published earlier on Friday showed that 5.38 million people had been given their first dose of a vaccine, with 409,855 receiving it in the past 24 hours, a record high so far.

England and Scotland announced new restrictions on Jan. 4 to stem a surge in the disease fueled by the highly transmissible new variant of the coronavirus, which has led to record numbers of daily deaths and infections this month.

The latest estimates from the health ministry suggest that the number of new infections was shrinking by between 1% and 4% a day. Last week, it was thought cases were growing by much as 5%, and the turnaround gave hope that the spread of the virus was being curbed, although the ministry urged caution.

The closely watched reproduction “R” number was estimated to be between 0.8 and 1, down from a range of 1.2 to 1.3 last week, meaning that on average, every 10 people infected will infect between eight and 10 other people.

But the Office for National Statistics estimated that the prevalence overall remained high, with about one in 55 people having the virus.

“Cases remain dangerously high and we must remain vigilant to keep this virus under control,” the health ministry said. “It is essential that everyone continues to stay at home, whether they have had the vaccine or not.”

Britain has recorded more than 3.5 million infections and nearly 96,000 deaths – the world’s fifth-highest toll – while the economy has been hammered. Figures on Friday showed public debt at its highest level as a proportion of GDP since 1962, and retailers had their worst year on record.

(Additional reporting by William James, Alistair Smout, Andy Bruce and Sarah Young; Editing by Alison Williams)

South African virus variant may resist antibody drugs; Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine seems to work vs UK variant

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.

South African variant may resist current antibody treatments

The variant of the new coronavirus identified in South Africa can resist, or “escape,” antibodies that neutralize earlier versions of the virus, scientists have found. It “exhibits complete escape” from three classes of monoclonal antibodies manufactured for treating COVID-19 patients, and it shows “substantial or complete” resistance to neutralizing antibodies in blood donated by COVID-19 survivors, the scientists reported on Tuesday on bioRxiv ahead of peer review. Similarities between the South Africa variant and another variant identified in Brazil suggest the Brazilian variant will show similar resistance, they added. Liam Smeeth of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, who was not involved in the study, noted that these were laboratory tests, and it would be unwise to extrapolate the findings to humans at this point. “The data do raise the possibility that the protection gained from past infection with COVID-19 may be lower for re-infection with the South African variant,” he said. “The data also suggest that the existing vaccines could be less effective against the South African variant.” He called for large studies among populations where the variant is common.

Pfizer/BioNTech shot likely protects against UK variant

The COVID-19 vaccine from Pfizer Inc and BioNTech SE is likely to protect against the more infectious variant of the virus discovered in Britain and now spreading around the world, according to laboratory tests. Researchers took blood samples from 16 people who had received the vaccine and exposed the blood to a synthetic virus, or pseudovirus, that was engineered to have 10 mutations found in the UK variant. The antibodies that had developed in response to the vaccine effectively neutralized the pseudovirus, according to a report posted on Tuesday on bioRxiv ahead of peer review. “This makes it very unlikely that the UK variant will escape from the protection provided by the vaccine,” said Jonathan Stoye, a virus scientist at Britain’s Francis Crick Institute who was not involved in the research. Similar experiments are needed with the more concerning variant first found in South Africa, he suggested. AstraZeneca Plc, Moderna Inc and CureVac NV are also testing whether their respective vaccines will protect against the fast-spreading variants.

Immune system will remember how to make COVID-19 antibodies

People who have recovered from COVID-19 can likely mount a fast and effective response to the virus if they encounter it again because their immune system’s “B cells” will remember how to make the antibodies needed to fight it, a new study shows. Researchers tracked 87 COVID-19 survivors for six months and found that while levels of antibodies to the virus may decline over time, the number of memory B cells remains unchanged. The antibodies produced by these cells are more potent than the patients’ original antibodies and may be more resistant to mutations in the spike protein the virus uses to break into cells, they said. For example, they found, the antibodies could recognize and neutralize at least one of the mutations in the South African variant of the virus that has caused concern among health experts. Even if antibody levels fall, B cells will remember how to make them when necessary, according to study leader Michel Nussenzweig of Rockefeller University, whose findings were reported on Monday in Nature. If this is true at six months, as in this study, it is safe to assume it is probably still true for longer periods, he added. People who have recovered from COVID-19 “may become infected but the immune system will be prepped to fight off the infection,” Nussenzweig said.

Mortality higher when ICUs are packed with COVID-19 patients

The more full an intensive care unit (ICU) is with COVID-19 patients, the higher the mortality rate among those patients, new data suggest. When researchers tracked outcomes of 8,515 COVID-19 patients admitted to 88 U.S. Veterans Affairs hospitals in 2020, they found that survival rates improved between March and August. Throughout the study period, however, the risk of death was nearly double when at least 75% of ICU beds were filled with COVID-19 patients, compared to when they accounted for no more than 25% of ICU beds. COVID-19 mortality “increases during periods of peak demand,” said Dr. Dawn Bravata of the Richard L Roudebush VA Medical Center in Indianapolis who co-led the study published on Tuesday in JAMA Network Open. “The more the public can do to avoid infections, the better,” she added. In addition, Bravata said, “facilities within a healthcare system or within a geographic region should collaborate to triage critically ill patients with COVID-19 to sites with greater ICU capacity to reduce strain on any one facility.”

(Reporting by Nancy Lapid, Linda Carroll, Kate Kelland and Ludwig Burger; Editing by Bill Berkrot)