Members of the federal government are holding a meeting to discuss a new variant of the novel coronavirus that has been spreading quickly across the United Kingdom, prompting travel bans from several European countries on Sunday.
“This afternoon, @JustinTrudeau and I are meeting with our colleagues and officials from the Incident Response Group to discuss the genetic variant of the virus that causes COVID-19 identified in the United Kingdom,” Health Minister Patty Hajdu said Sunday on Twitter.
The new COVID-19 variant was first reported by the British government in London, England on Monday, inciting tighter lockdown restrictions throughout the city.
By Sunday morning, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, Austria and Germany had barred flights from the U.K. to quell the spread of the virus, although there is debate among scientific communities on whether or not travel bans are the most effective way to limit the spread of the virus.
Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson said Saturday early data found the variant to be 70 per cent more transmissible than its predecessor. He emphasized, though, that it was not expected to be more lethal than the previous variant, and that vaccines should still be effective against it.
“There’s no evidence that it causes more severe illness or higher mortality, but it does appear to be passed on significantly more easily,” he said.
“Although there’s considerable uncertainty, it may be up to 70 per cent more transmissible than the old variant, the original version of the disease. This is early data and it’s subject to review.”
“But it’s the best that we have at the moment and we have to act on information as we have it, because this is now spreading very fast,” Johnson said.
Zain Chagla, an associate professor of medicine at McMaster University, said it was important to be careful, but said there were alternative solutions to shutting down borders.
“Theoretically, even if it is more transmissible, as long as we’re imposing quarantine effectively for people from the UK, our people flying back from the UK, then that theoretically should mitigate the risk as much as possible,” he said.
To that effect, Chagla noted that COVID-19 variants could already be developing in other parts of the world independently from the one in the U.K.
“There could be other variants in other places in the world that aren’t doing this type of genomic surveillance that are actually spreading more efficiently than this,” he said.
“It’s too much to just kind to say: ‘blanket ban.’”
Global News reached out to the Public Health Agency of Canada to determine if the variant circulating the UK has reached Canada, and if the country is considering imposing a travel ban, but did not hear back by time of publication.
The Office of the Prime Minister was also unable to confirm what actions would be taken in time for publication.
The news comes as Canada marks a grim milestone in the wake of surging cases of COVID-19, surpassing 500,000 confirmed infections Saturday.
As of Saturday evening, the country had reported 501,189 cases, hitting the grim milestone less than one week after the federal government formally kicked off its mass immunization campaign and begun vaccinating front-line workers.
For now, scientists say that these mutations, called “N501” and “H69/V70 deletion,” are expected in the case of any new virus, and should be no cause for concern.
Any new mutation “bears a little bit of watching,” Dr. Gerald Evans, chair of infectious diseases division at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont. said in a previous interview with Global News.
However, he noted “we don’t know if it’s going to change anything.”
As Colin Furness, an epidemiologist teaching at the University of Toronto, said: “people should not be freaking out.”
Generally, he said viruses and bacteria mutate to become more contagious and less lethal.
“A virus that kills you immediately doesn’t have much chance to spread,” he explained.
“It doesn’t actually want to kill anyone. That’s a byproduct that’s not useful. It just wants to spread.”
Even if there is a mutation that spreads faster, Furness said “just because there’s a mutation doesn’t mean the vaccine has any trouble with it, and even if the vaccine does have trouble with it, it may not be catastrophic.”
“Having a country with very little of [the coronavirus] all of a sudden turn into a country with the whole ton of COVID-19 doesn’t mean COVID-19 got more contagious. It means it got a foothold with some super spreader events and then started to do what it does,” he said.
— With files from Reuters and the Associated Press.
© 2020 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.
