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Addressing a briefing right here on Monday, WHO Chief Scientist Soumya Swaminathan mentioned the novel coronavirus has mutated at a a lot slower fee than the influenza virus, the latter having required that its vaccine strains be reviewed and revised annually primarily based on the circulating strains prevalent that yr, Xinhua information company.
“So far, even though we’ve seen a number of changes, a number of mutations, none has made a significant impact on either the susceptibility of the virus to any of the currently used therapeutics, drugs or the vaccines under development,” she mentioned.
The WHO chief scientist emphasised that it was necessary to repeatedly monitor what’s taking place to this virus, with the main focus on bringing transmission down and getting it as little as attainable.
“Because the more viruses you have in circulation, the more chances of mutation and the more such variants that can arise. The bottom line here is to keep the virus transmission low and keep circulation low.
“Don’t enable it to get out of hand and unfold in the inhabitants. That approach, we will preserve the mutations down,” Swaminathan added.
Meanwhile, Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO’s Health Emergencies Program, said that even with the latest UK variant, “there’s zero proof at this level that there is any improve in severity related to this illness”.
He reiterated that no variants have yet established themselves as “having any larger degree of severity, or invading our diagnostics, or hiding from vaccines, or the effectiveness of vaccines”.
The UK on December 14 reported to the WHO of the new variant that has been associated with an increase in R0, which is the number of people that one infected individual transmits the virus to, from 1.1 to 1.5.
“That simply put the barrel up a little bit bit; in some senses, it means we’ve to work more durable,” said Ryan.
“Even if the virus has change into a little bit bit extra environment friendly in spreading, the virus will be stopped.”
He added that R0 around 1.5 means the virus can be stopped.
“We’ve had R0s a lot larger than 1.5 at totally different factors of this pandemic and we’ve obtained it below management. This scenario shouldn’t be in that sense uncontrolled, nevertheless it can’t be left to its personal gadgets.”
The UK variant is currently not affecting most of the Covid-19 diagnostic tests either, according to Maria Van Kerkhove, technical lead on COVID-19 response at the WHO Health Emergencies Program, as most of the tests are looking at multiple targets within the genome.
But very few tests that have only looked at a single target may be impacted in detecting this particular variant, she added.
The WHO experts urged the public to keep implementing existing public health measures, including wearing masks, hand hygiene and social distancing, which have been proven to be effective in curbing the spread of the virus, including the latest variants.
(This story has not been edited by Newslivenation workers and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)