There is a high incidence of infection in London and the south east of England at the moment, that's not in doubt. If you look at the scenes of vast throngs of shoppers in London's Oxford Street etc. in the last week or two and the pathetically shabby mixed messages from Johnson & Co. as they've continued to mismanage their response to the pandemic, it's hardly surprising.
Talk of a "Super Covid" in such scaremongering terms at the moment isn't much help and seems to be ahead of the medical research. Mutations in the virus have been logged around the world for some time, and a number of them appear to have made it more contagious. Here's a more sober article from 15 December:
What you need to know about the new variant of coronavirus in the UK
On 14 December, the UK’s health minister, Matt Hancock, told parliament that a new variant of the coronavirus associated with faster spread had been identified in south-east England. This has led to widespread concern, spurred by newspaper headlines about “super covid” and “mutant covid”. Here’s what you need to know about this new variant.
What do we know about this new variant so far?
It was first sequenced in the UK in late September. It has 17 mutations that may affect the shape of the virus, including the outer spike protein, according to Nick Loman at the University of Birmingham in the UK, who is part of a team that has been monitoring and sequencing new variants. Many of these mutations have been found before in other viruses, but to have so many in a single virus is unusual.
So it has a whole bunch of mutations, not just one?
Yes. To put this in context, however, the coronavirus is constantly mutating and there are lots of variants with one or more mutations. In fact, by July, there were already at least 12,000 “mutants”. The number will be higher now, though many mutations are rare and the viruses carrying them often die out.
Hang on, there are more than 12,000 variants of the coronavirus?
There are tens of thousands that differ from each other by at least one mutation in the genome. But any two SARS-CoV-2 coronaviruses from anywhere in the world will usually differ by fewer than 30 mutations, and are regarded as all belonging to the same strain. Researchers instead talk about different lineages.
So what’s unusual about this one?
How fast it is spreading really caught the attention of researchers monitoring viral evolution. By 13 December, 1100 cases of the variant had been identified, mostly in the south and east of England, which is a lot because only a small proportion of viral samples get sequenced. “It’s the growth rate we are worrying about,” says Loman. “We are seeing very rapid growth.”
Are the mutations in this variant helping it spread?
We don’t know that yet. The variant is spreading faster than other strains in the same regions, but it isn’t yet clear why. By pure chance, some coronavirus lineages do spread more than others. For now, there is no clear evidence that this is due to these particular mutations. “At the moment, we don’t know if this is making a blind bit of difference,” says Lucy van Dorp at University College London.
How worried should we be?
It will take a combination of further monitoring and lab studies looking at the effect of the particular mutations present in this variant to find out if it really is more infectious. But so far, no mutation has definitively been shown to make any SARS-CoV-2 lineage more transmissible or more dangerous.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2263077-what-you-need-to-know-about-the-new-variant-of-coronavirus-in-the-uk/
