Coronavirus variant gaining ground in England, data show

The strain of coronavirus first identified in India is gaining ground in parts of England, according to new data showing that the number of local authorities where it makes up more than half of sequenced cases has almost doubled in a week.

The number of areas where genetic analysis found the strain is dominant jumped from 12 to 23 in the week ending May 8, underlining the challenge ministers face as they seek to tackle the new strain by speeding up the mass immunisation programme.

The two places where the highest prevalence was detected were both in the north-west of England: the borough of Sefton on Merseyside, where the variant made up 90 per cent of cases, closely followed by the town of Bolton in Greater Manchester at 86 per cent.

The publication of the latest data, although patchy in terms of a national picture, comes as scientists seek to answer two questions crucial to determining whether plans by the UK government to take England fully out of lockdown can stay on track.

Policymakers want to know whether the first generation of jabs protects against the new strain and whether transmission is now taking place widely in local communities.

The latest picture, based on a Financial Times analysis of local authority data compiled by the Sanger Institute, shows that in early May the main hotspots of the variant, known as B.1.617.2, were in London and the north-west of England.

The variant made up more than half the sequenced cases in nine of the capital’s 32 boroughs. However, in many cases, the sample sizes were very small. In the east London borough of Havering, for example, four out of just seven sequenced cases were found to be the B.1.617.2 strain. In contrast, in Bolton the variant accounted for 289 out of 337 cases.

The government’s scientific advisory group, Sage, warned on Friday that the variant could be as much as 50 per cent more transmissible than the UK’s dominant B.1.1.7 coronavirus strain, which was first identified in the county of Kent, in south-east England.

The latest figures would suggest that the higher the share in an area of sequenced cases identified as B.1.617.2, the more its total case numbers have risen over the past week. However, the picture is not clear cut and infections are also rising in areas where that strain is less prevalent.

Greg Fell, director of public health for Sheffield, said while his area had so far seen only a few sporadic cases of B.1.617.2 “we would be fools if we thought that [situation] would last for ever”.

However, it was too early to conclude that the variant was more contagious, he argued, because of the living conditions in the hotspots. “What we are seeing is generalised community spread from a number of initial ‘seeds’” made easier by “very closely connected, hyperlocal communities with densely packed housing”, in which people were often not able to isolate. It was possible that the variant was “genuinely biologically more transmissible but we don’t know yet,” he added.

John Bell, regius professor of medicine at Oxford university, said that the “‘50 per cent more transmissible’ hypothesis [was] based on pretty limited data,” adding: “We don’t know if this is being led by imported cases; we don’t know how much of this is coming through Heathrow so to speak.”

Fell said there was growing evidence, however, that the vaccines remained effective against the strain. Virologists believed that its genetic make-up was “closer to the original Wuhan virus than the South African variant which is the one we are most concerned about from an immune escape perspective”.

He suggested that there was evidence in India that vaccines were working, given that the country’s healthcare workers had been “very well vaccinated and there have been vanishingly few cases of severe harm or death [among that group]”.

An FT analysis of official UK data suggests that the vaccines do offer protection against the variant, which is more concentrated in the younger age groups that have yet to be immunised.