Eminent scientist warns UK’s new COVID variant might ‘sweep the world’

London: The mutated coronavirus strain that has been dominant in the United Kingdom’s Kent region, could ‘sweep the world in all probability’, Sharon Peacock, director of the Covid-19 Genomics UK consortium said.

Recently, BBC quoted Peacock narrating that the new mutation of the coronavirus could affect the way the virus is handled in terms of immunity and effectiveness of vaccines, thus threatening vaccination.

The New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group has also titled the Kent variant as a ‘Variant of Concern’.

The Kent variant or E484K mutation is one of the three major variants of the coronavirus that has distressed scientists working round the clock to fight the COVID-19 pandemic.  They consider it most infectious, if not more deadly than the others and express concerns that it might be quite capable of sweeping the entire world.

Peacock further said that once the virus mutates itself out of being virulent, people could relax but that might take around 10 years or so.

Currently, two Covid-19 vaccines by Pfizer/BioNTech and AstraZeneca are being known to protect against the Kent variant of the coronavirus.