Two New Studies Show That the U.K. COVID-19 Virus Variant Is Not Linked to Severe Disease —But Questions Remain

In two studies published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases and in The Lancet Public Health, respectively, scientists provide comforting news about a new strain of the COVID-19 virus that emerged from the U.K. last December. It has since become the dominant virus in the region, accounting for nearly all of the new COVID-19 cases there—and has recently been implicated in spikes in parts of the U.S., as well as other parts of the world. The researchers report that the so-called B.1.1.7 variant of the virus is not linked to more severe disease or death, and that the virus isn’t causing different (or higher numbers of) symptoms among those infected compared to previous strains of SARS-CoV-2. But they also stress that their findings aren’t the final word on the impact of the variant. Indeed, the results conflict with those of another study published last month in Nature, which found the opposite outcome among hospitalized patients. In that study, the B.1.1.7 variant was linked to an increased risk of dying from the disease compared to other variants. In the study published in Lancet Infectious Diseases, scientists led by Dr. Eleni Nastouli associate professor of infection, immunity and inflammation at University College of London, sequenced the virus obtained from samples from 341 people who tested positive for COVID-19 at two hospitals in the U.K. between November and December 2020, just as the new variant began to spread there. About 58% of these people were in...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized COVID-19 Source Type: news