The United Kingdom’s health secretary confirmed Wednesday that yet another “highly concerning” variant of the coronavirus has been identified in the U.K., likely originating from South Africa.
As a result, Secretary Matt Hancock said that the government will implement new travel restrictions on those attempting to enter the country from South Africa and urged those who had been to South Africa within the last two weeks to self-quarantine for two weeks, according to the Independent.
“These measures are temporary while we investigate further this new strain which is shortly to be analyzed at Porton Down,” Hancock said. Porton Down is a science park that is home to both the U.K. Ministry of Defence’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory and Public Health England.
South Africa’s health minister announced last week that researchers had discovered a new dominant strain of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that was a contributing factor to the dramatic spike in cases the country has experienced in recent weeks, according to the Washington Post.
“Clinicians have been providing anecdotal evidence of a shift in the clinical epidemiological picture — in particular noting that they are seeing a larger proportion of younger patients with no comorbidities presenting with critical illness,” Zweli Mkhize said, adding that the evidence “strongly suggests that the current second wave we are experiencing is being driven by this new variant.”
So far, two infections in the U.K. have been confirmed to be the South African variant.
“We are incredibly grateful to the South African government for the rigour of their science and the openness and the transparency with which they have rightly acted as we did when we discovered a new variant here,” Hancock added. “This new variant is highly concerning because it is yet more transmissible, and it appears to have mutated further than the new variant that has been discovered in the U.K.”
The news is another development in an already troubling week for the British Isles. The U.K. announced a new strain of its own in the southeastern part of England that could be up to 70% more transmissible than the current dominant strain, and more than 40 countries, including the entire European Union, unleashed travel bans on the U.K. France even blocked freight and cargo from crossing the English Channel, leading to trucks being backed up for miles along England’s M20 highway.
The U.K. is also rushing to complete negotiations with the EU to prevent a no-deal Brexit going into 2021. A deal could be announced as soon as Wednesday, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Health officials in the U.K. and the United States have stressed that neither variant has demonstrated a resistance to vaccines.
“What there is no evidence of, nor reason to believe — it is not any more lethal or any more dangerous than the normal coronavirus,” U.S. testing chief Adm. Brett Giroir said on Monday. “No evidence to suggest that. No reason to believe it. There is also no evidence to suggest, nor reason to believe, that it would evade our vaccines that we have right now.”
These are not the first coronavirus mutations to accelerate transmission. In June, researchers determined that the strain of the coronavirus found most frequently in the U.S. and Europe was a mutation of the original virus identified in China and was as much as 10 times more contagious. As with the most recent mutations, that strain made the virus “more transmissible without resulting in a major observable difference in disease severity.”
