Information on this new strain is still patchy, but the concerns are more and more consistent.
The announcement on Saturday of the United Kingdom's re-containment, which deplores the emergence of a variation of the coronavirus with fuzzy effects, but likely to be 70% more contagious than the previous strain, is causing a stir in Europe.
The Netherlands announced overnight from Saturday to Sunday that it had suspended all flights from the country.
Belgium imitated it this Sunday morning, announcing that no flight or train from the country will be able to reach its territory from midnight and Germany and France have said for their part to consider "seriously" to suspend the connections in from Great Britain (Berlin also targeting South Africa, where a mutation of the virus was also observed).
Le Parisien takes stock of this worrying strain.
How does a mutant virus work?
Note first that there is nothing more normal than a mutation of a virus, because it is necessary for its survival.
This is a copy of the virus, which contains an error from its initial version.
"Mutations are part of the normal operating mode for viruses," explained Tuesday to Parisian Vincent Enouf, deputy head of the National Reference Center for respiratory viruses (Institut Pasteur), in Paris.
READ ALSO>
Variant of Covid-19 in the United Kingdom: what we know about the mutant virus
This discovery of a new strain in the south of England - it would be a variation seen in the proteins that allow the virus to attach to cells - is therefore not so surprising.
It is also far from the first observed since the emergence of the pandemic, since there have been at least 25 since the detection of the first patient in Wuhan, in December.
The most recent concerned a mink farm in Denmark.
These mutations are measures that the virus uses to prevent the antibodies that we develop on contact with it from rejecting it.
Thus, it evolves regularly, by developing new strains, in an attempt to survive in the face of our immune system which is strengthening and threatening it.
In an article, the scientific journal Nature also reveals that coronaviruses mutate less than other viruses.
“The sequencing data suggests that coronaviruses change more slowly than most other RNA viruses, possibly due to a
corrective
enzyme
,” she says.
How do you locate a strain?
For the case of the south of England, it is analyzes carried out on patients in this region where the epidemic was experiencing a galloping progression, which revealed that at least 1000 patients were carriers of a new variant of SARS-CoV -2, which contains, according to the Minister of Health, 23 changes.
According to government scientific adviser Patrick Vallance, who spoke on Saturday, this strain appeared in mid-September and caused 62% of the contaminations detected in London and 43% of those recorded in the south-east of the British region.
Another mutation was also detected very recently in South Africa.
Researchers are looking for these mutations, which allows them to better understand the progression of the virus and its effects on humans and thus to better eradicate it, in particular by developing vaccines.
After locating this new strain, and reporting it to the World Health Organization, they sequenced it and shared it on an international database dedicated to research on this coronavirus, Gisaid, which will allow scientists all over the world to work on this strain to determine its evolution.
Is this mutation more dangerous?
On Saturday, Prime Minister Boris Johnson indicated that in the United Kingdom, this new variant of the virus is transmitted "much more easily", arguing that it would be "up to 70% more contagious".
Statements confirmed this Sunday by his Minister of Health Matt Hancock, who said that this new variant was "out of control" and that "the only way" to regain control was to "restrict social contact".
Morning essentials newsletter
A tour of the news to start the day
Subscribe to the newsletterAll newsletters
But increased transmission does not necessarily mean exacerbated dangerousness.
Indeed, if the virus mutates, it can keep a similar behavior during infection.
And on this point, Boris Johnson wanted to be reassuring: "Nothing indicates that it is more fatal or that it causes a more severe form of the disease".
"Nothing suggests that the symptoms are different, that the tests are different or that the clinical result is different for this variant", added in a statement released Saturday Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer of England.
These statements will obviously have to be supported by additional studies carried out in particular on patients in whom the presence of this variant has been observed.
What risk in France?
The current risk could be that this new strain is transmitted on French territory and spreads at a greater speed than the strain currently circulating.
According to information from the Parisian, France also indicated this Sunday morning that it in turn was considering suspending planes and trains from our neighbors.
If, as the British Prime Minister has stated, this variant is not more dangerous, it nevertheless risks affecting more people and therefore clogging up hospital services which have so far managed to stay afloat, in particular thanks to the latest health measures taken in France.
In order to avoid any possible transmission, the recommendations remain the same in the face of the epidemic: wearing a mask, social distancing and all barrier gestures are more than ever to be observed.
The Christmas period, with a reduced curfew for New Years Eve, could be a real test, faced with the possible emergence of this new strain on French territory.
Does this call into question the vaccination campaign?
Difficult at this stage to answer this question since we do not know how much the virus could have mutated.
But it is on this point that the fears of scientists are concentrated, since the vaccines placed on the market or in the process of being so have been developed from the most widespread strains of the virus.
And this was not part of it then.
In the state of current knowledge, the British scientific consortium assures not to be worried.
"There is currently no evidence that this variant (or any other studied to date) has an impact on the severity of the disease, or that it makes vaccines less effective, although these two issues require further study. ", He insisted in a statement.
On BFMTV, Mylène Ogliastro, vice-president of the French Society of Virology explained that “the vaccine is directed against the Spike protein, which allows the coronavirus to enter human cells”.
According to this virologist, “the mutations currently observed, including in this new variant, will affect very small parts of this Spike protein.
They do not call into question the cocktail of antibodies that the vaccine will generate when it is inoculated into us ”.
This is the point that researchers around the world will now look into, while in the United Kingdom, the vaccination campaign is in full swing.
And the concern is real: we know that in the case of influenza, for example, these mutations may have made the viruses more resistant to the vaccine and have required product developments over the years.
Conversely, in the case of measles, despite numerous mutations, the vaccine produced retains the same efficacy.
