Conversation with Dr Nora Vyas, Associate Professor Psychology at Kingston University.
The Coronavirus is an RNA virus, these types of virus, more or less, tend to make mistakes as they reproduce, these mistakes are the mutations.
The emergence of a new lineage of the SARS-CoV-2 virus has new consequences:
It is more infectious.
It is not more severe disease causing.
It may be more disease causing in the younger age, school age children. We will have to revisit continuing education in a safe manner if the new lineage is more infectious and disease causing in school age children.
By being more infectious it will generate more cases, more cases mean more people admitted to hospital with severe illness, more deaths.
Reasons for increase in number of cases is also due to human behaviours, increased interactions with other people leads to a rise in the number of cases too, not everything can be assigned to a more infectious strain.
We expect the existing vaccines to work against the new lineage. If they do not, we can reengineer the vaccines to code for the new variant spike protein, so it is good news that we have vaccines and that they can be reengineered if need be.
We expect existing immunity to work against the new lineage (new strain) of the virus, however, good surveillance is important and there is watchfulness to confirm that second, new infections are not occurring in large numbers.
