Jan 27th, 2021
3 mins
Recently the government Chief Science Adviser Sir Patrick Vallance made comments on the new variant of COVID-19. Not only did he reiterate that the new variant is spreading 30 to 70% more easily than the original variant, but mentioned it doesn’t differ in terms of age distribution compared to the original variant.
It does appear that this variant has increased mortality compared to the old virus, as well as increased transmission. To put this in context he made a comparison to the original variant, if you took a group of 1,000 infected men in their 60s roughly 10 would die. But with the new variant, roughly 13 or 14 of that group might be expected to die.
There is increasing evidence from studies that vaccines will still work against the UK variant. For more information on the new variant we have provided a paper from the New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (NERVTAG) which explains this further.
NERVTAG paper on COVID-19 variant of concern B.1.1.7 – GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)
In addition, Public Health England has also provided an update and explain the need to reduce all routes of transmission, including within the food and retail industry where the risk is greatly heightened.
