THE coronavirus infectivity-lethality puzzle is an old one.
It first surfaced when the coronavirus counter started registering spiking cases of infections and some deaths in Wuhan, China, a year ago.
Experts and laymen were inclined towards infectivity then. Not that SARS-CoV-2 is not deadly. It is.
At press time, the coronavirus had killed more than 2.4 million people around the world. But it has infected more. Close to 110 million are down with the virus.
The coronavirus hasn't spared any country. Even the remotest island has caught the virus. All it takes is for one nation to sneeze and the rest of the world quickly catches the coronavirus cold.
Blame it on a borderless world. Not that the border can stop the bat — the usual suspect — from flying in. Or keep traffickers of wildlife, the intermediary hosts, from getting in. Now the pendulum is swinging towards lethality with the publication of a study by the New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (NERVTAG) on the United Kingdom government's website on Friday.
NERVTAG says the Kent variant, B117, which first appeared in the English county in September, may be 30 to 70 per cent more deadly than the 4,000 or so variants circulating around the globe.
B117was first thought to have a higher transmissibility than the SARS-CoV-2— one report assigned 70 per cent higher infectivity.
This was because of a higher load of the variant in the human hosts' respiratory system. Infectivity may now turn lethal.
Vaccines, together with a generous dose of vigilance, will help. The idea is to keep the distance from the coronavirus.
The ink on the NERVTAG paper isn't a week old, and the UK is already alerting the world of another worrying variant, the B1525. The Guardian, the English daily, quoted researchers on Monday as reporting 32 cases in Britain.
B1525 is said to have been detected in 10 countries, giving a grand total of 111 cases of the new variant, according to the University of Edinburgh report dated Feb 15.
Malaysia isn't one of them, though B117 has been detected here. The earliest presence of the B1525 in Britain was traced to December in a genome sequencing study by the researchers. Is it as deadly as B117?
Hard to say with the information available, the researchers tell the newspaper. But danger signs are there. The team has spotted the E484K mutation in B1525, which is also present in B117.
Malaysia may need to do more of such studies here to know what we are dealing with, says University Malaya epidemiologist Professor Datuk Dr Awang Bulgiba Awang Mahmud.
Malaysia may not have that many genome sequencers as Britain, Denmark and Iceland, but enough to spot some early dangers. And universities are ready, willing and able to do just that.
Dr Awang Bulgiba suggests random sequencing of some of the viruses, especially in the large clusters, to see if the lethal variants are here.
"Characteristics of patients carrying a particular variant can then be analysed to see if the characteristics are different from other patients with other variants."
In this way, questions such as "Does the variant cause a more severe form of Covid-19?" or "Does the variant cause a longer infectious period?" can be answered, he says.
He is right. Answering these questions would tell us if we have to tweak our prevention or treatment strategies. Or even change either or both.
Data help win wars. So will they in our war against Covid-19.