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The variant of the Delta coronavirus that ravaged the United Kingdom has become dominant in Portugal and has appeared in clusters in Germany, France and Spain, which has caused European health officials to warn that more action is needed to curb -ne propagation.
Although the new strain, which first emerged in India, still accounts for only a fraction of all coronavirus cases in continental Europe, it is gaining ground, according to a Financial Times analysis of global genomic data from the Gisaid virus tracking database. It accounts for 96% of Covid-19-sequenced infections in Portugal, more than 20% in Italy and about 16% in Belgium, according to FT calculations.
The small but growing number of cases has raised concerns that the Delta variant could halt the progress made by the EU in the last two months in reducing new infections and deaths to their lowest level since at least the autumn.
“We are in the process of shredding the virus and crushing the pandemic, and in no case should we let the Delta variant have an advantage,” French Health Minister Olivier Véran told a vaccination center in Paris on Tuesday. .
Véran said 2% to 4% of virus samples analyzed in France were shown as the Delta variant: “You could say this is still low, but it’s similar to the situation in the UK a few weeks ago.” FT analysis of Gisaid data suggests that this figure could be higher.
In Portugal, community transmission of the variant has been detected in the Lisbon area, where more than 60% of new coronavirus cases in the country were identified last week. Non-essential trips to and from the city have been banned this weekend in an effort to prevent the rise in cases from spreading to the rest of the country.
Scientists across the continent are now looking to the UK, where Covid-19 cases have tripled in the last month and the Delta variant accounts for about 98% of all new infections, to get clues as to what might happen. then and what measures may be needed. to be taken.
After official data showed that the Delta variant appeared to increase the risk of hospitalization by 2.2 times compared to the Alpha variant, the UK government has imposed a one-month delay this week on the elimination of remaining coronavirus restrictions.
“The decisions the UK makes to open up life and society will serve us as a laboratory in Europe,” said Bruno Lina, a virologist from Lyon who advises the French government and helps coordinate the sequencing of variants in the country.
Whether Delta infection groups affecting the EU become larger outbreaks will depend in part on the number of people completely vaccinated, scientists said, as well as on the behavior of people now that many restrictions are being removed. life and business.
Recent UK government research has highlighted the need to complete vaccination programs as soon as possible. In accordance with data collected by Public Health England, the first dose of a Covid-19 vaccine is usually less effective against the Delta variant than with previous strains. Two doses increase protection against symptomatic Delta infection from 33% to 81%.
Although in the UK, approximately 46% of the population has been fully immunized, vaccination rates in most continental European countries range from 20% to 30%. Approximately 26% of the population in France has been completely vaccinated.
French authorities are currently trying to contain an outbreak in the Landes region, near the Spanish border, where 125 cases of the Delta variant have been confirmed by genetic sequencing and another 130 are suspected, representing approximately 30 % of recent infections in the area. Clusters of the Delta variant have also been identified in recent weeks in the southern suburbs of Paris and an art school in Strasbourg.
In each case, health officials have responded with the same formula: increased contact tracking and a renewed push to vaccinate people in the affected areas.
“If we keep vaccination at a good pace and some non-pharmaceutical interventions such as masks inside, we can still suppress the circulation of the virus this summer,” said Lina, the French virologist. “This variant will replace the others (we have to keep that in mind), but it doesn’t mean it will lead to a new epidemic wave.”
Some scientists fear that the Delta variant has already spread further, but has been detected since less of the genomic sequencing needed to identify variants in continental Europe has been completed. Although the United Kingdom has sequenced more than 500,000 Sars-Cov-2 genomes, Germany, France and Spain have sequenced some 130,000, 47,000 and 34,000 respectively.
“It’s expensive, time-consuming and neglected,” said Antoine Flahault, director of the Institute of Global Health at the University of Geneva.
However, Denmark has sequenced a high proportion of cases and has still identified only a small number of Delta infections, although the variant arrived in the country at about the same time as in the UK.
This could be explained in part, experts said, by demographic and movement differences, including the number of cases imported into the country from high-prevalence regions, such as India, and the living conditions of the communities in which they live. is sown.
The difference in Delta’s spread rate in European countries remained “a bit mysterious,” said Jeff Barrett, director of the Covid-19 Genomic Initiative at Cambridge’s Wellcome Sanger Institute.
However, many experts believe that where the Delta variant is introduced, it will eventually become dominant. The key, they say, will be to increase the proportion of people completely vaccinated, while slowing down the transmission of the virus as much as possible.
“We need to make the messages very clear,” Lina told Lyon. “This is not over.”
Additional reports by Daniel Dombey, Peter Wise, Guy Chazan and Clive Cookson
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