Public health restrictions would still work against the new coronavirus strain if it spreads to the State from Britain, according to Cillian De Gascun, director of UCD’s National Virus Reference Laboratory.
“The public health interventions that we have against the virus will be effective against this novel variant; just people need to be more vigilant,” he said.
As the Irish Times reports, Precautionary action such as the travel ban was being taken to prevent the spread of the variant because much of the surrounding data was “preliminary” and “unexplained” and because of concerns about the variant’s mutations in the spike protein, the part of the virus that helps it infect cells in the body, he said.
We don’t want to take any chances with it because if it is more transmissible and it is evolving more quickly, then that will make it more difficult potentially to control.
He also said there was no suggestion this new virus strain caused more disease in people it infected and there was no evidence that it would damage the effectiveness of the vaccines.
“It is not unreasonable to be cautious at this point until we have more information, and we can answer those questions a little better,” he said speaking to the Irish Times.
Dr De Gascun said the new coronavirus variant could potentially result in the reinfection of people who previously had Covid-19 and who developed protective antibodies from that infection.
“It is possible that the antibodies that they produced against the old virus from their original infection might not be as effective in protecting them against this novel variant,” he said.
“We don’t have the laboratory studies to confirm that but that is one of the concerns at this point.”
