[D66] [JD: 94] Variants of concern (VOC) B.1.620

[R.O.]

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/05/scientists-tracking-coronavirus-variants-struggle-global-blind-spots
https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/covid-19/variants-concern


By Meredith Wadman
May. 14, 2021 , 6:30 PM

Science’s COVID-19 reporting is supported by the Heising-Simons Foundation.

Last month, Gytis Dudas was tracking a concerning new coronavirus
variant that had triggered an outbreak of COVID-19 in his native
Lithuania and appeared sporadically elsewhere in Europe and in the
United States. Exploring an international database of coronavirus
genomes, Dudas found a crucial clue: One sample of the new variant came
from a person who had recently flown to France from Cameroon. A
collaborator, Guy Baele of KU Leuven, soon identified six more sequences
from people in Europe who had traveled in Cameroon. But then their quest
to pinpoint the variant’s origins hit a wall: Cameroon had uploaded a
total of only 48 genomes to the global sequence repository, called
GISAID. None included the variant.

With dogged legwork, Baele and Dudas, an evolutionary biologist at the
Gothenburg Global Biodiversity Centre, learned another team had gathered
as-yet-unpublished sequences from a COVID-19 outbreak among staff at a
great ape program in the Central African Republic—near the Cameroonian
border. Six people there carried the new variant.



Baele, Dudas, and their colleagues reconstructed the variant’s
evolutionary tree and geographic spread, and concluded that the new
variant most likely arose in Cameroon, as they reported in a preprint on
8 May. They note that the variant carries a suite of mutations seen in
other “variants of concern” that are more infectious or dangerous.

“It looked like the typical thing that should raise all red flags,” says
Sebastien Calvignac-Spencer, an evolutionary biologist at the Robert
Koch Institute whose team sequenced samples from the ape station. But
Cameroon and neighboring countries, where the team inferred the variant
might already be prevalent, had been blind to it.

The researchers say the story of this variant, designated B.1.620, holds
a warning for the world: “The sequencing effort in Cameroon and other
African countries is not enough,” says co-author Ahidjo Ayouba, a
biologist at the French National Research Institute for Sustainable
Development at the University of Montpellier. He is traveling to his
native Cameroon next month to set up the country’s first next-generation
sequencer. The emergence of new variants with deleterious mutations in
countries with no regular sequencing “may become an alarming norm,” the
researchers caution in the paper.

[...]