As progress continues in the progression of a imaginable COVID-19 vaccine, a strain of the new coronavirus has been detected that experts say may be more infectious through the fitness government in Malaysia and the Philippines.
As parts of Asia begin to see a momentary wave of COVID-19 infections, Malaysia has largely managed to stop its coronavirus outbreak. As of Sunday, August 16, the country has reported 9,200 cases and 125 deaths.
On August 16, Malaysian health leader Noor Hisham Abdullah said in a Facebook post that the Kuala Lumpur Institute for Medical Research had detected a SARS-CoV-2 virus mutation in 4 new cases in the country. Three of the cases were similar to groups in the northwestern state of Kedah, while one case was similar to a group in the southern city of Ulu Tiram.
The new strain of the virus has been called the D614G mutation. Science Magazine reported on the mutation in July and said its call comes from an amino acid at position 614 of aspartic acid (abbreviated in D) in glycine (short for G).
In his Facebook post, Malaysia’s fitness leader said the variant has shown “10 times less difficult to infect other people.” He also raised the option that vaccines that are being tested lately around the world may not be effective in treating this recent mutation.
The mutated strain has been detected in neighboring the Philippines, which is recently experiencing the worst COVID-19 outbreak in Southeast Asia. On Monday, August 17, the country recorded more than 161,000 cases shown and 2,665 deaths.
According to The Straits Times, the Philippine Genome Center in Quezon City has discovered the new mutation in a small group of recent cases.
“In June, D614 and G614 were detected in a small pattern of positive cases,” the center said. “While this data confirms the presence of the G614 in the Philippines, we note that all the proven patterns came here from Quezon City and would probably not constitute the mutation landscape for the entire country,” he added.
The consequences of the new mutation are still clear.
According to an article by Yale University researcher Nathan Grubaugh and his affiliates in the clinical journal Cell, the effect of the D614G mutation on vaccine transmission, disease and vaccine progression remains largely unknown.
Previous studies through AMERICAN biologist Bette Korber and his colleagues at los Alamos National Laboratory have revealed that the G614 variant has recently replaced D614 as the “dominant pandemic form.” Korber’s studies hypothesized that the immediate spread of the new variant meant it was more infectious than past strains, this has not yet been demonstrated.
According to Grubaugh and his colleagues, so far there is no evidence recommending that the D614G mutation result in a more serious infection of COVID-19 disease, the global expansion of the mutation “means that this variant is now the pandemic.”
Kanta Subbarao, virologist at the Doherty Institute at the University of Melbourne in Australia, told the Australian Broadcasting Network that viruses “almost never become more virulent.”
“There is no doubt that this coronavirus is bad, but its slow mutation rate gives us a very clever possibility.”