A newer, and reportedly more contagious strain of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) from the UK has prompted fears among netizens who have tagged the virus as ‘COVID-20’ that trended on social media on December 21.
Residents living in London and parts of England were alerted further when UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock warned that the said new strain is “out of control”, forcing over 16 million Britons to stay at home and forego their Christmas plans, as per reports from Bloomberg.
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However, the new coronavirus strain (VUI-202012/01) is not likely to become COVID-20 contrary to what netizens have been tagging the new virus as. Experts have likewise stressed that the potential impact of the more contagious strain is still too early to tell.
“There are many variants. It just happens that this one has quite a few more mutations than some of the other variants, so that’s the reason why we’ve taken it particularly seriously. But there’s nothing to suggest that the symptoms are different, that the testing is different, or that the clinical outcome is different for this variant,” explained Professor Chris Whitty, England’s Chief Medical Officer in a report from Metro.
Meanwhile, Hancock stressed that there’s no evidence to date that the new coronavirus strain is more likely to trigger serious diseases or other adverse health effects.
The Health Secretary furthered that vaccines currently available for COVID-19 in the market produce antibodies against many regions in the spike protein – and that it is unlikely that this mutation would render the vaccine to be less effective.
