Although there has been a considerable decrease worldwide in the number of Covid-infections 19, which has meant that in some places the sanitary measures have been relaxed with the intention of returning to normality, health experts indicate that the situation could get complicated again in the coming weeks due to a new variant of the virus.
The new variant of Covid has been called BQ 1.1 and is being closely followed by English researchers, one of them named Tom Peacock, who is a virologist at the Imperial Department of Infectious Diseases at Imperial College London and is an expert in coronavirus, who published relevant information on Twitter about the course that the pandemic could follow.
According to Peacock, the variant “BQ.1.1 is BA.5 but has gained several additional mutations in RBD – R444T, K444T and N460K”. In addition, he indicated that this new variant “has shown very rapid growth in recent weeks, particularly in the United Kingdom.”
On the other hand, Cornelius Roemer, viral bioinformatician at Biozentrum at the University of Basel, had already confirmed that “BQ.1.1 is showing quite a bit of growth, especially in England, where the first sample was sent 9 days ago and now there are 28 sequences”.
And he explained that “it is enough It is clear that BQ.1.1 will drive a wave of variants in Europe and North America before the end of November because it took only 16 days grow 8 times from 5 sequences to 200 sequences”.
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