What do I need to know about the new coronavirus variants? – WHYY

This is one of a series of articles in which reporters from WHYYs Health Desk Help Desk answer questions about vaccines and COVID-19 submitted by you, our audience.

Even as hospitals and clinics distribute COVID-19 vaccines all over the country, new and more contagious variants are beginning to travel across the globe.

Today, we focus on one key issue: What do we need to know about those coronavirus variants?

First things first: What is a virus variant, and where does it come from?

All viruses mutate: chickenpox, flu, even the common cold. The virus that infects one person is not going to be 100% identical to the virus that infects someone else.

Thats because in order to spread, viruses have to make copies of their own genetic material and when they make those copies, they sometimes make small mistakes or changes. As those small changes build up, they can also change the way a virus acts, making it more contagious, or less dangerous, etc.

The new COVID-19 variants identified in Brazil, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and now potentially California are essentially new versions of the virus that have collected small changes over time. Because of that, theyre now more contagious than the version of the coronavirus were used to.

That brings us to our question, from a WHYY listener in Philadelphia named Cynthia Olds. Shes concerned about the variants but says she hasnt really heard about them in the context of Philadelphia or Pennsylvania have they identified any cases here?

Yes. On Jan. 15, officials identified a case of the U.K. variant in a woman from both Philadelphia and Bucks counties. The city Department of Public Health said she had started having symptoms of the coronavirus in late December, was briefly hospitalized, and was recovering.

But we dont yet know for sure whether people in our area are being widely infected by the new variant. Thats because in order to identify which cases are which, scientists have to take samples from each case and compare the virus to itself kind of like a spot-the-difference game, albeit much more complex.

One way to do that is through something called viral whole genome sequencing, where scientists isolate the RNA from viral samples and compare them side by side, to determine which changes have occurred.

Rick Bushman, who teaches microbiology at the University of Pennsylvania and serves as co-principal investigator of the universitys new Center for Research on Coronaviruses and Other Emerging Pathogens, leads a team thats already started sequencing samples from patients at Penn Medicine hospitals. His team was the one that identified the Philadelphia/Bucks County womans case.

For the U.K. strain, for example, it has multiple changes in this protein on the outer surface of the viral particle the spike protein, Bushman told WHYY. And theres increasing evidence that those changes can affect how the virus binds to cells and helps them get into human cells so that it may allow the virus to spread more commonly between people.

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What do I need to know about the new coronavirus variants? - WHYY