How Scared Should We Be of the New COVID-19 Variants?
A lot of recent COVID-19 news has been about the new variants, one of which was first noticed in the UK. (Other COVID-19 news is about overwhelming of hospital resources and huge numbers of deaths, partly due to bad decisions made around the winter holidays, but this is not surprising at all. We knew this would happen. Seriously, stay home.)
The variants sound scary, though. The New York Times is reporting multiple variants from multiple regions of the world. Along with these variants, we’re seeing a higher-than-expected rise in hospitalizations and positive cases. This tells us that the new variants may be more contagious than the original strain!
What is a variant?
Humans have DNA, which is like twisted ladders that contain instructions for all the things our cells need to do. (I explain more about how that works in this post about how mRNA vaccines work.) Coronaviruses have RNA instead of DNA, which is like half a ladder.
Every time coronavirus RNA makes more of itself, it makes some copying errors. Think of them like typos. These typos are called mutations.
One mutation might usually doesn’t do too much, but over time, these typos add up. The more the virus spreads and makes copies of itself, the more opportunities there are for more typos. Lots of typos together might make the virus weaker, which means it won’t spread as fast or can be defeated more quickly. Lots of typos together can also make the virus stronger. That’s what has happened. The virus that causes COVID-19 collected enough mutations that it got more contagious.
That’s scary.
However, scientists think this new variant might be less dangerous. We still don’t know whether the greater spreadability will outshine the lesser dangerousness, causing more deaths than the original virus would have.
Here’s an important piece of news that might help: the mutations collected by the new variants do not seem to affect the way the virus is affected by the antibodies of people who got the Pfizer vaccine. In other words, the Pfizer vaccine seems to be just as effective against the new variants. Scientists expect the same results from the Moderna vaccine, which is almost identical to the Pfizer one.
The new variants make it more important to stick with social distancing and masks, but fortunately, it probably won’t have a huge impact on the pandemic end date. Whew.
Sources:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/09/world/europe/coronavirus-mutations.html
https://www.breakthroughs.com/advancing-medical-research/how-do-viruses-mutate-and-what-it-means-vaccine
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00031-0