For many scientists, there is no doubt that the emergence of a more contagious mutation in SARS-CoV-2 risks delaying recovery from the crisis.
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With the arrival of a first vaccine against Covid-19, the light finally seemed “at the end of the tunnel”, and the end of the epidemic at hand. But for many scientists, there is no doubt that the emergence of a more contagious variant of SARS-CoV-2 may well delay the end of the crisis.
“It will be very difficult to block its dissemination and we must protect the most vulnerable people as quickly as possible, starting with those over 75 years old, “said Arnaud Fontanet, epidemiologist at the Institut Pasteur and member of the Covid-19 scientific council. “We are engaged in a real race against time”, he insists, stressing that this “VoC-202012/01” as it was baptized, has already been circulating for several weeks in France.
Reported in September 2020 in England, this new variant first spread at low noise, before gaining momentum until it became dominant in December in several regions. On December 19, the UK shot the alarm bell , and, in France, the Department of Health says it has deployed a “detection and surveillance system” of the British variant.
“Hopefully it There will be inertia in the start of the distribution of this clone in France. But we will not have the three months that England had: we will have to go faster, “warns Arnaud Fontanet. “I thought we were seeing the end of it, but this emergence will make the first months of 2021 very complex”, he notes.
“Hit early and hard”
To avoid finding ourselves in the situation of the United Kingdom, forced in the emergency, to a drastic reconfinement, it “must strike early and hard”, estimates the epidemiologist. Local or even national measures, stricter than the curfews in force could be necessary to counter a third wave, “while waiting for the return of the sunny days”, less favorable to the circulation of the virus.
Problem, France does not currently have the quality of the United Kingdom’s surveillance network, which massively uses the sequencing of viral genomes, the only tool capable of spotting the inevitable evolutions of the virus. Thanks to the COG-UK initiative (for Covid-19 Genomics UK), British universities and hospitals have contributed 146,000 of the 322,000 genomes to the global Gisaid database, as of January 5. Against 2,900 for France.
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