New UK Covid variant may be 30% more deadly, says PM

A new variant of Covid-19 that emerged in south-east England late last year and spread around the world may be more deadly than the coronavirus in circulation in the first wave of the epidemic, Boris Johnson has said.

Scientists on the government’s New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (Nervtag) have concluded that the new variant, named B117, may increase the death rate by 30%-40%.

The variant is also believed to be 30-70% more transmissible. There had been hopes it would become less deadly as it evolved, as has been seen with some other viruses.

One expert warned that the increased lethality of the variant, confirmed by the prime minister at the No 10 press briefing on Friday, could take the UK “back to square one”.

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Four teams of researchers at Imperial College London, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Public Health England and Exeter University assessed the variant’s lethality by comparing death rates among those who tested positive for the new variant with those who were infected with older variants.

“When we look at those who tested positive, there’s evidence of an increased risk for those who have the new variant, compared with those who had the old virus,” Sir Patrick Vallance, the government’s chief science adviser, said.

He said that the increase in risk was unclear, but that for 60-year-old men the death rate appeared to rise from 10 in 1,000 cases to 13 to 14 per 1,000 cases. “There is a lot of uncertainty around these numbers and we need more work to get a precise handle on it, but it is a concern,” Vallance added.

“There is no preferential age, it can affect anybody at any age, similarly to the original variant, the original virus.”

The prime minister’s press conference heard that there was good evidence of vaccines continuing to work against the variant.

The new variant was first spotted in Kent on 20 September and linked to the sharp rise in cases in the south and east of England during the November lockdown.

Dr David Strain, a senior clinical lecturer at the University of Exeter Medical School, said that the possibility that the new UK variant was not only more contagious but also more deadly than previous variants was worrying.

“The key fact here is that all of the good work that’s been done with [the drug] dexamethasone and is being done with better treatments strategies has reduced the mortality in the UK by about a third. [If the new mortality figure is correct that] has now been lost and we are back to square one, we are back to where we were the first time around,” he said.