A new and more infectious variant of COVID-19 was recently discovered in South Africa.
This prompted at least five countries to suspend flights from South Africa including Germany, Turkey, Israel, Switzerland and Saudi Arabia.
According to the Department of Health, experts are considering the possibility of imposing the same travel ban to keep the virus away.
“We will convene our experts. ‘Yung pong ating endorsement kay) Pangulo ((Our endorsement to the President) …the benefit of our experts from the technical advisory group. Our ears are stuck to the ground to listen for the recent reports or developments with regard to this new strain of SARS-COV-2,” DOH Sec. Francisco Duque III shared.
The World Health Organization (WHO) is now having talks with health officials in South Africa on the latest development.
“So what we’re doing right now, we are working with them with our SARS-COV- 2 virus evolution working group to determine any changes in the behavior of the virus itself in terms of transmission,” WHO – COVID-19 Technical Lead Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove relayed.
For now, the Philippine Genome Center is studying the new variant in the United Kingdom. The PGH gathered samples from Metro Manila and compared the spike protein mutations with the variant found in the UK.
“A total of 65 Philippine SARS-CoV-2 isolate sequences were gathered from publicly available sequence databases (GISAID and NCBI GenBank), as well as from in-house samples recently collected in Metro Manila as part of the Philippine Genome Center’s biosurveillance efforts,” the Philippine Genome Center disclosed.
“Practically no overlaps were observed between the spike protein mutations of the UK variant and the local SARS-CoV-2 isolates apart from the previously reported D614G mutation…local isolates are not closely related with the UK variant,” the PGC further explained.
Secretary Duque assured that the PGC will continue to inform the public regarding significant changes on the COVID-19 strains. – Report from Mark Fetalco
