#15,985
In addition to yesterday's comments from the UK Health Secretary, the PHE released update COVID surveillance reports, a new technical briefing (#13), a (slightly) revised Risk Assessment on B.1.617.2, and announced the addition of another Variant Under Investigation (VUI) to their watchlist.
The UK currently has 14 variants (5 VOC and 9 VUI) on their watchlist, and are monitoring more than a dozen others.
Most of these variants are destined to fall by the wayside, as the more biologically `fit' variants spread more efficiently, and will be dropped from this list. But as we've seen with B.1.617.2, a variant that wasn't even on our radar 2 months ago can quickly rise to dominance.
The PHE's announcement on the new VUI follows:
New Variant Under Investigation
A further variant, VUI-21MAY-02 (C.36.3), has been designated as a Variant Under Investigation (VUI) on 24 May on the basis of the mutation profile and increased importation from a widening international area.
There have been 109 cases of VUI-21MAY-02 dispersed across the country to date. The C.36.3 variant was first detected in Thailand, in cases who had travelled from Egypt.There is currently no evidence that this variant causes more severe disease or renders the vaccines currently deployed any less effective. PHE is carrying out laboratory testing to better understand the impact of the mutations on the behaviour of the virus.All appropriate public health interventions will be undertaken, including additional contact tracing and targeted testing. Where cases have been identified, additional follow-up of cases, testing of contacts and if required targeted case finding will limit its spread.More information will be available in Variant Technical Briefing 13, which Public Health England will publish on Thursday 27 May.
Moving on to the revised risk assessment, you'll notice that the confidence level on current vaccine effectiveness is now listed as MODERATE, confidence in Immunity after natural infection is LOW, and there is not enough data to speak to Infection Severity (compared to B.1.1.7).
While there are no big changes here from last week, the overall assessment now reads:
B.1.617.2 has continued to replace B.1.1.7 and there are now clusters of areas with clearly growing incidence of B.1.617.2. There are also areas where there are limited S gene target data which may obscure the most recent expansion of the outbreak.
The observed growth rate is most likely to be due to a combination of place based context, transmissibility and immune escape.
The priority investigations are vaccine effectiveness against hospitalisation and transmission, household secondary attack rate corrected for vaccination, characterisation of the generation time, viral load and period of infectivity, epidemiological studies of reinfection and comparative severity analyses.
Due to their world class genomic testing capability, the UK continues to provide us with the best information on many of these new variants. It is still isn't known whether B.1.617.2 poses any greater (or lesser) threat to human health than the other variants, but its rapid spread is reason enough for our concern.
