It is not just the South African and Brazilian mutations that cause headaches for the researchers. B 1.427 and B 1.429 are the scientific names of two virus types that have found their way from California to the USA, Mexico, Denmark and Australia. Researchers fear that the Californian mutants could evade both the immune system and the vaccination, reports zdf.de.
But first the good news: The number of new corona infections continues to fall in the USA. According to Johns Hopkins University, there were around 50,900 cases on Sunday. For comparison: at the beginning of January, 300,000 new infections were counted on a single day.
In California, too, the curve continued down to around 5,300 new infections, while daily peaks above 40,000 were recorded in December and January. Even so, scientists worry about the fact that new virus mutants are constantly spreading.
Researchers at the University of San Francisco examined the Californian variants in more detail in a study. On the one hand, they come to the conclusion that the new mutants are more contagious than other variants of the coronavirus. About twice as many virus particles were found in the nasal swabs of the infected as in infections with other virus types.
On the other hand, there is also the fear that B 1.427 and B.1429 could not only evade the immune system, but also the vaccine and thus render it ineffective.
The team analyzed 2,174 samples from 44 districts of California. The samples come from the period from the beginning of September last year to the end of January 2021. The course of the disease of 324 patients who were treated in the university clinic was also examined.
More than 50 percent of the samples examined had the California virus mutation at the end of last month, according to the researchers, it could even be 90 percent in other samples by the end of March. According to the science magazine “Science”, the scientists found that patients with the new California variant were 4.8 times more likely to end up in the intensive care unit and 11 times more likely to die than those infected with another type of virus.
Accordingly, the Californian variant seems to be more lethal than other mutations, which is rather unusual: In order to ensure their own survival, viruses usually mutate into more contagious but less deadly pathogens.
Study meets with criticism
Critics of the study complain that the amount of data obtained is insufficient to draw reliable conclusions from it. More data is required from even more infected people. The fact that the more contagious Californian variant is fundamentally more dangerous cannot be proven beyond doubt on the basis of the results from a rather small sample. It is also unclear whether types B 1.427 and B 1.429 were solely responsible for the high numbers of infections in California over the past few months.
The study by the University of Fan Francisco is still being examined by local health authorities. If the approval is successful, the study will be published shortly.
According to the online edition of the Tagesspiegel, due to the high number of infected people, virologists assume that new, more infectious mutants will continue to appear and that their proportion of infections will increase. The extent to which the existing vaccines work against them and how dangerous they will be must be examined individually. For the “Californian” mutation, a reduced but still sufficient effect of the vaccines is suspected.
From: mk
–
