Senior Research Fellow at the Virology Laboratory of the West African Institute for Cell Biology of Infectious Pathogens (WACCBIP), Dr Peter Kojo Quashie, has shared insights into how new variants of the COVID-19 disease are detected.
Speaking to Samuel Eshun on e.TV Ghana’sFact Sheet’ show, he explained that as is the nature of viruses, COVID-19 has been able to “replicate or grow to make variants”.
“A virus is such that every time it divides, it changes. So if it divides into ten then maybe one is similar to the original virus. And most of the time, the change of the other nine is bad for the original virus”.
To detect the changes, however, Dr. Quarshie shared: “What makes us call a virus new variant is when it changes how it behaves. So in this case, once it changes how it behaves we notice that something is different and when we sequence it, you see that the difference is at the molecular level.
You can see that, for example, one of the changes for this variant is that one part of the building block has been shifted for something else and that is enough to cause it to be more infectious. The new variant allows the virus to bind to the receptors in the throat much more than the original virus. So once you start seeing that in more people, then it means we have to start taking notice. And that is what we call a variant of public concern”.
Dr. Quarshie revealed that currently the new variant detected in Ghana is the UK variant and this he says is “about thirty (30) to forty (40) percent more infectious than the regular variant”.
Illustrating how this is possible he stated that if the already existing COVID-19 virus can infect one out of five people who have come into contact with someone who has tested positive for COVID-19, then for the new variant all five persons can be infected if they come into contact with a person infected with the new variant.
When questioned about the symptoms of this new variant, he stated: “These are the symptoms we already know but there are more prominent ones which are body pains and what we are hearing now is that all of a sudden people experience shortness of breath. They might not have had any symptom prior to that. These are symptoms that were there before but they are coming to prominence now with the new variant”.
In the first week of February, the Ghana Health Service (GHS) announced that the new Covid-19 variants from the United Kingdom (UK) are spreading faster and widely among the Ghanaian population, with higher disease burden.
The Service thus advised people to strictly observe the preventive and safety protocols put in place by the government.
Ghana’s active COVID-19 cases stand at 7,866 with 561 deaths.
By: Alberta Dorcas N D Armah
