First reported from South Africa, a new C.1.2 coronavirus disease (Covid-19) variant which has so far spread to at least six countries has, thankfully, spared India. The Government assured on Wednesday that no cases of the new C.1.2 coronavirus disease (Covid-19) variant, said to be more transmissible and evade protection provided by vaccines, have been detected in India so far.
According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), it is monitoring the new C.1.2 virus strain. However, the UN public health body is yet to classify the reported C.1.2 coronavirus variant as either a ‘variant of interest’ or a ‘variant of concern’.
C.1.2 Covid-19 variant was first detected in South Africa in May, but an alert about the “C.1.2 lineage” was issued by the National Institute for Communicable Diseases in India on Monday. It said, however, that the Delta variant is still the most dominant strain of the coronavirus in South Africa.
On medRxiv, a preprint server for health sciences, a paper that is yet to be peer-reviewed pointed out that the C.1.2 Covid-19 variant has been detected across the “majority” of provinces in South Africa and “seven other countries spanning Africa, Europe, Asia, and Oceania”; however, the exact extent of the variant’s spread has not yet been confirmed by health authorities.
According to the study cited earlier, the C.1.2 lineage has a mutation rate of about 41.8 mutations per year, which is about twice as fast as the current global mutation rate of the other variants. So far, researchers say that the mutations N440K and Y449H, associated with immune escape from certain antibodies, have also been found in C.1.2 sequences.
WHO has a system of classifying coronavirus variants based on their transmissibility, virulence, or efficacy in the face of social measures. While ‘variants of concern’, such as the Delta variant, show an increase in transmissibility, more severe disease (for example, increased hospitalisations or deaths), the ‘variants of interest’ usually show community transmission in multiple clusters, but are not necessarily more virulent or transmissible.
An alert was still issued by the South African institute since the C.1.2 variant is reported to contain a few “key mutations” which could trigger it to become variants of interest or concern.