Scientists across the world are reportedly paying attention to a coronavirus subvariant that may be more infectious than the Delta variant.
The U.K. Health Security Agency said in a study released last week that AY.4.2, a descendent or "sub lineage" of one of the Delta strains, had begun spreading in the U.K. and is under "monitoring" status.
The Blaze noted that even though data on the said new subvariant is scarce, scientists in the United Kingdom claimed that it "accounted for approximately 6% of all sequences generated" and was "on an increasing trajectory" in the week starting September 27.
According to BBC News, AY.4.2 was found in July and has been steadily rising - until recently, that is, when the new subvariant's prevalence increased dramatically.
The Blaze also reported that in a tweet thread on Saturday, University College London Genetics Institute Director Francois Balloux said that the subvariant may be 10% more infectious than the most common Delta variant, known as AY.4, which spread rapidly around the world last summer.
BTW, even if A.Y.4.2 is genuinely ~10% more transmissible, it does not explain much of the recent case rises in the UK. Assuming 10% higher transmissibility and a freq of 10% only translates in 1% additional cases per ~5 day viral generation interval (i.e. 0.1 x 0.1 = 0.01).
12/— Prof Francois Balloux (@BallouxFrancois) October 19, 2021
According to Balloux, AY.4.2 is only "marginally" more contagious than its parent strain, but also emphasized that the strain is worth monitoring because of its potential for spreading.
It's nothing, he told the BBC, when compared to Alpha and Delta, which were 50-60% more transmissible.
The U.K. government has not yet designated the new strain as a "variant of concern," and it hasn't demonstrated much of an upward trend in other countries where it's been discovered, including Denmark and the U.S.
There's a general consensus, though, that further research and close observation are required.
Scott Gottlieb, the former FDA commissioner under President Trump, recognized that the strain is probably not a "cause for immediate concern," but urged for urgent study to see if it is more highly infectious or has a "partial immune evasion."
"We should work to more quickly characterize these and other new variants. We have the tools," he wrote on Twitter. "This needs to be a coordinated, global priority for Covid same as similar international efforts have become standard practice in influenza."
Also in a recent tweet, Dr. Jeffrey Barrett, head of the COVID-19 Genomics Initiative at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge, said that AY.4.2 is the only Delta descendant that is "steadily increasing," suggesting that it has a "consistent advantage" over other strains.
The Blaze points out that the new data may be a "fluke," and the spread of the new subvariant could slow or stop altogether. However, data collected in the United Kingdom as recently as late spring accurately anticipated the eventual spread of the Delta variant in the United States, which happened months later.
According to the Telegraph, while AY.4.2 may not be to blame for the recent uptick in cases in the UK, there is growing concern about the trend of the coronavirus there as cases have increased by 16.1% in the past week.
Britain's infection rate, which the report estimates to be 620 per million people, is almost six times greater than that of its European and Scandinavian counterparts.
However, AY.4.2 is unlikely to be the source of the problem. However, despite this increase in frequency, the subvariant is still rare in the UK, with just a handful of extra cases being produced by a 10% rise in transmissibility, according to Prof Balloux.
