The British government on Tuesday said it would “closely monitor” a new accessory Govit-19. It is spreading in the United Kingdom, which is facing an increase in pollution, and it has not been established whether this subtype is highly contagious.
This variant, called “AY4.2”, is a sub-variant of the highly contagious delta, which first appeared in India and re-emerged in late spring and early summer. “We are closely monitoring this new form and will not hesitate to take action if necessary,” a government spokesman for Downing Street said.
Despite Delta’s very strong epidemic of rejecting new strains, the emergence of this new variant still raises fears of strong transmission. The United Kingdom, which separates nearly 139,000 deaths from Covid 19, faces increasingly positive cases and now exceeds 40,000 every day, with the incidence rate higher than the rest of Europe.
This will not be in the form of a sharp rise in cases
Some scientists attribute the current deterioration to restrictions currently in place, mainly for adolescents and young adults, such as weakened immunizations, immunosuppression of the very early vaccine, or in July, lifting indoor masks in the UK.
But for Francois Baloux, director of the Institute of Genetics at UCL (University College London), the new variant “does not appear to be the result of a recent increase in the number of recent cases in the United Kingdom”. With its low frequency so far, he explains, “a 10% higher exchange would have only resulted in a lower number of additional cases.” The origin of AY4.2 would not “be a situation comparable to the origin of the alpha and delta strains, which would have spread (50% or more) more than all the strains in circulation at the time,” the researcher said.
The new variant AY4.2 is almost non-existent outside the UK, except for three cases in the US and a few more cases in Denmark, which have almost disappeared. Work is underway to test its resistance to the vaccine.