Date Published: 22/01/2021
ARCHIVED - British variant expected to become the dominant form of coronavirus in Spain by March
ARCHIVED ARTICLE
On Friday afternoon the British Prime Minister said new evidence is emerging that this strain may be more deadly
The health authorities in Spain are gradually accepting that unfortunately the “British strain” of coronavirus is likely to become the dominant one in this country before long, and Fernando Simón, the Director of the Coordination Centre for Health Alerts and Emergencies, has moved his position from that adopted 10 days ago when his stance was that the impact of the variant in Spain was “marginal” to warning on Friday that by mid-March it could well account for between 40 and 50 per cent of all cases and will become the “dominant” strain in Spain.
At present the British strain is being detected in under 5 per cent of confirmed cases of Covid-19 in Spain, but the ease with which it is transmitted and the fact that it is now established in this country seem to point to it soon spreading far more widely. During the period before December when the restrictions on travel were less severe than is currently the case it is inevitable that the strain will have travelled from England to Spain, where around 300,000 UK nationals are officially resident.
Sr Simón’s estimate is based on applying the same timescale for the spread of the strain as was observed in the UK, where the variant was first detected in late September and was accounting for 40 per cent of infections by mid-December (as opposed to 4 per cent three months earlier).
As for ways in which the more virulent mutation of the virus can be combated, Fernando Simón repeats that the aim is not to invent new preventative measures but to apply and implement those which already exist. These include the closure of bars and restaurants, which has been seen to be effective in reducing transmission of Covid: as Sr Simón says, most people do not go to a bar to stand alone in a corner, and of course in order to eat and drink it is necessary for facemasks to be removed in a public place.
New variant could be more deadly after all
After several weeks denying that the "British variant" was any more deadly in spite of being more virulent, the British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, made a statement on Friday afternoon to the effect that the "British variant" may be associated with a higher degree of mortality.
Mathematical analysis comparing the number of deaths attributed to the “old” strain of the virus compared to those of fatalities found to have been infected by the new “British variant” found that the fatality rate in those infected with the new variant was up to 30% higher.
The illustration given was that if the fatality average recorded amongst 1,000 60 year-old patients was 10 deaths, then the new variant would increase that average to 13, making the new variant potentially 30% more deadly.
It is already believed that the new variant spreads between 30-70% faster.
Scientists working on the New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (NERVTAG), shared the data with the government, and although the government's chief scientific advisor, Sir Patrick Vallance, said that there was more work to do in order to produce more accurate data, he did say that “it obviously is a concern that this has an increase in mortality as well as an increase in transmissibility, " but also that, "I want to stress that there's a lot of uncertainty around these numbers and we need more work to get a precise handle on it.”
Up until this afternoon it was believed that the danger presented by the "British variant" lay in its transmissability; the number of contagions being higher, thus increasing the number of hospitalisations and subsequent deaths based on the sheer number of additional diagnoses.
Meanwhile, in Madrid the regional government is carrying out its own research into the contagiousness of the British strain, warning that it is on the rise and claiming that the national government is playing the importance of the variant down.
The Andalucían Government, which last week blamed the presence of the British variant on the “explosion” of new cases in its region, said on Friday that the British variant had been detected in analysis of faecal waters as far back as December 17th in Granada.
The Andalucian Government has been particularly concerned about the potential spread of the variant from Gibraltar due to the high volume of interchange between workers in the Campo de Gibraltar and the Rock, where a case was detected in November, weeks before the British Government admitted that the variant was widespread across the country and was behind the sudden surge in new cases.
The variant has now been detected in more than 50 countries.
The Pfizer and Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccines are both expected to be effective against the variant although there is more concern about the "South African" and "Brazilian" variants which may be less susceptible to the existing vaccines.