New coronavirus strain: What did the government know?

New variant does not cause more serious disease or higher rates of mortality, government says

The government has been forced to effectively cancel Christmas for millions of people in England amid the growing spread of a new, highly infectious strain of coronavirus.

Boris Johnson said there was “no alternative” on Saturday evening - just days after dismissing Labour’s calls to take more concerted action to tackle the nationwide rise in cases.

Health secretary Matt Hancock said the government was only informed of the severity of the situation on Friday, yet warnings over the variant were first raised at the start of the week.

How did we get to this position in the first place?

The new variant, called VUI 202012/01, was first identified in October from a sample taken the month before, according to Public Health England (PHE).

Online lab records suggest the first detected case of the virus was picked up in the government's Lighthouse Lab in Milton Keynes on 20 September, while PHE said on Saturday that the person who provided the swab was from Kent.

After the first official records of the virus were noted, progress was slow, and it wasn't until England's second wave took hold in late October that cases exploded.

At the time the first sample was recorded, the UK was averaging just 3,700 positive tests per day. By the start of November, the average number of positive results had jumped to 23,000 per day.

By the middle of the same month, it is thought to have caused roughly 28 per cent of cases in London and other parts of southeast England, said Chris Whitty, England’s chief medical officer.

Up to 9 December, the mutated virus accounted for:

• 43 per cent of cases and 28 per cent of hospitalisations in the Southeast
• 59 per cent of cases and 38 per cent of hospitalisations in the East
• 62 per cent of cases and 34 per cent of hospitalisations in London

What did the government know?

The health secretary insists the government acted "very quickly and decisively" after ministers were told on Friday by the New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (Nervtag) that the VUI 202012/01 strain was spreading more quickly.

It was only at this stage that Downing Street was given the full picture, according to Mr Hancock, with scientists putting it to ministers that the variant was 70 per cent more transmissible than the dominant strain in the UK.

Dr Susan Hopkins, chief medical adviser of PHE, said that the evidence for this was based on modelling the rate of increase in the new strain compared to others in circulation.

She said that scientists weren’t fully confident in the figure and that there is a wide range in the estimates.

However, Labour leader Keir Starmer said the alarm bells had been "ringing for weeks" and that Mr Johnson - who insisted on Wednesday that it would be "inhuman" to cancel Christmas - had repeatedly failed to act.

"It is an act of gross negligence by a Prime Minister who, once again, has been caught behind the curve," he told an online press conference.

On 14 December, the government first announced that the strain had been identified by PHE and was being assessed.

Speaking in Parliament at the time, Mr Hancock said at least 60 different local authorities had recorded Covid infections caused by the new variant.

The World Health Organisation had been notified, the health secretary added.

As of 13 December, 1,108 cases associated with VUI 202012/01 had been detected, predominantly in the south and east of England, the government said.

How long has the variant been in circulation for?

At this stage, it’s impossible to tell.

Let’s address what we do know. A total of 23 mutations have been detected in the new variant.

Some of these mutations are “silent” and don’t have any function, but “crop up and come along for the ride”, says Dr Jeffrey Barrett, lead Covid-19 statistical Geneticist at Wellcome Sanger Institute.

Others are significant and change the biology of Sars-CoV-2, altering the sequence and shape of certain proteins that make up the virus.

One of these mutations, known as N501Y, sits in the so-called ‘spike’ protein – the part of the virus which is responsible for binding to human cells.

The new mutation, according to the scientists, has increased the ability of the spike receptor to attach to certain proteins that cover our own cells, therefore making it more infectious.

However, this N501Y mutation is not actually that new, says Dr Julian Tang, a virologist at the University of Leicester.

An examination of the global sequence database for Sars-CoV-2 shows that N501Y was already circulating, sporadically, much earlier in the year outside the UK: in Australia in June-July, USA in July and in Brazil in April.

This implies the mutation could have been brought to the UK and Europe later by travellers or arose spontaneously in multiple locations around the world (in response to human host immune selection pressures). However, this "requires further investigation,” says Dr Tang.