Mayo Clinic Insights: Dr. Binnicker provides information on the current COVID-19 variants and how we can help stop the spread of new strains in our communities.
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variant basically means a mutation that occurs in the virus over time so just with natural evolution over time as the virus infects people it has the opportunity to replicate its genome and every time it replicates its genome there are chances for errors or mutations to occur we’ve now been a year with this virus and as it’s infected millions of people it’s replicated its genome billions of times and errors have been incorporated these resulted in mutations or variants we fully expected that variance mutations would occur with this virus there’s three primary variants or mutations of sars kov2 one was first identified in the united kingdom a second was identified in south africa and a third out of brazil the united kingdom variant has higher potential for transmission so it’s going to spread faster and easier between people we don’t think that it has worse disease outcomes yet so it doesn’t cause more severe disease or lead to a higher rate of hospitalization the south african variant also seems to have higher rates of transmission and then the brazil variant’s still very new and we’re learning more about that media outlets and even scientific reports are referring to these viruses by where they were first characterized or identified by the time we learn about them they’re spread through many countries if not throughout the world so it’s more important to understand that this occurs naturally we expect this to happen i think that it’s safe to say that the currently circulating strains variants of stars kobe 2 that the vaccines will offer protection against those strains it’s really important to think about efficacy and effectiveness of the vaccine on a continuum rather than a binary yes and no now where that efficacy falls on the continuum i think is we’re still learning that the uk variant appears uh that the pfizer moderna vaccines which are very common will offer strong protection against that strain the south african variant there’s some evidence showing that the efficacy may be reduced now when we talk about reduced again it’s not going from 95 efficacy to zero it might be 95 percent efficacy to 85 efficacy against preventing severe covet disease viruses can’t mutate if they don’t replicate so all of those steps vaccination masking physical distancing are going to be really important to help drive down the number of infections and that will slow the emergence of new variants and mutations
