South Africa finds new Covid variant

Johannesburg: SOUTH AFRICA has identified a potential variant of interest (VOI) of Covid-19 that is assigned to the PANGO lineage C.1.2.

C.1.2 was first identified in May 2021 during the third wave of Covid in the country, said researchers from the country's National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD) and the KwaZulu-Natal Research Innovation and Sequencing Platform.

It has since been detected across the majority of the provinces in South Africa and in seven other countries spanning Africa, Europe, Asia and Oceania, the researchers reported in the study that is yet to be peer-reviewed and is posted on pre-print server medRxiv.

The variant has evolved from C.1, one of the lineages that dominated the first wave of SARS-CoV-2 infections in South Africa and was last detected in January 2021. C.1.2 is "associated with increased transmissibility and reduced neutralisation sensitivity," wrote the team, including Cathrine Scheepers, from NICD, in the abstract. Compared to C.1, the new variant has "mutated substantially" and is more mutations away from the original virus detected in Wuhan than any other Variant of Concern (VOC) or VOI detected so far worldwide.

According to the study, C.1.2 has 41.8 mutations per year. It is approximately 1.7-fold faster than the current global rate and 1.8-fold faster than the initial estimate of SARS-CoV-2 evolution.