A variant of the coronavirus that first emerged in the U.K., and has since been identified in over 50 countries, could become the dominant form of the virus worldwide, according to the head of the U.K.’s genetic surveillance program.
“The new variant has swept the country and it’s going to sweep the world, in all probability,” Professor Sharon Peacock, director of the Covid-19 Genomics UK Consortium, said.
“In the future, I think the key is going to be if something (a variant) is particularly problematic with the vaccines,” she told the broadcaster’s Newcast podcast.
The group that Peacock heads up was created in April 2020 and brings together highly-respected experts and institutes to collect, sequence and analyze genomes of the virus, as part of the U.K.’s pandemic response. To date, it has tracked the genetic history of more than 250,000 samples of the virus.
The consortium first detected the more infectious variant of the virus, dubbed the “British variant” and formally known as “B1.1.7,” in Kent in southeast England, in September 2020 through retrospective analysis of virus samples.
