Dr. Priya Sampathkumar, chairman of infection prevention and control at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, said this is because the more opportunities for the virus to spread, the greater the possibility of mutation.

Sampathkumar said: “If we allow the infection to spread unscrupulously within a month or two or inevitably at some point in time, we will have another variant that completely escapes all vaccines.”

“We will return to the first stop. We [will] The entire world’s population will have no immunity at all and face the risk of death. “

Watch | Variants related to the comeback of COVID-19 in the UK first discovered in India:

There are concerns that at least one variant of the virus, B1617, was first discovered in India in October 2020, and it spread rapidly in the UK and caused epidemics in dozens of other countries, and its spread is much higher than other variants.

According to a recent report by the New York Times, researchers from the World Health Organization have determined that B1617 is spreading rapidly in India, accounting for more than 28% of samples tested positive.

This shift indicates that this variant has a higher growth rate than other variants popular in India, with the exception of possible B117, which was first discovered in the UK

Zeynep Tufekci, a sociologist and associate professor at the University of North Carolina, wrote on Twitter: “It should be unthinkable that more people may die from COVID after we have a vaccine that can save them.” He wrote about COVID-19. Article. “However, now there are more transmissible variants and few vaccines to be fair, and this is what can happen.”

According to the BBC report, there are nearly 8,000 cases of B1617.2 (one of the subtypes of B1617) in the UK

recently New York Times Column Tufekci’s headline is “The deadliest stage of Covid may come soon.” He wrote that although widely vaccinated places may not be severely affected by the mutation, “but for most of the rest of the world, this A new, more communicative variant could be catastrophic.”

“Countries like India and Nepal have performed relatively well until recently, with fairly low immunity, and basically no vaccinations. A more contagious variant can quickly enter this immunologically naive population. Spread,” she wrote.

Sampathkumar said that scientists are still trying to determine whether the mutation first discovered in India is more lethal, leading to a larger proportion of infected deaths, or whether the surge in deaths is related to the number of cases.

“I don’t know if it is more deadly, but what we must have heard is that it has a much higher spread,” she said.

Sampathkumar said this means that every two or three people are infected with every positive case, and everyone in the family is now infected.

“If India is not contained, if South Asia is not contained, the whole world may return to last year’s level.”

Listen | British experts warn that Canada has a “narrow window” to include the B1617 variant:

Earlier this month, scientists who testified before a panel in the U.S. House of Representatives warned that the coronavirus Variants According to the “New York Times” report, this will pose a continuing threat to the United States, and may spread rapidly and weaken the effectiveness of the vaccine.

Salim Abdul Karim, professor of clinical epidemiology at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University in New York, told the expert group, “In the next few months, we can reasonably expect that there will be a vaccine that can escape the vaccine. A new variant that induces immunity. Because the virus is under pressure from mass vaccination.”

Various drivers for variants

Sharon Peacock, head of the British Consortium for Genomics for COVID-19, which studies mutations, said there are multiple drivers for the emergence of mutations??. One of these driving factors is uncontrolled spread among the population.

“Although the mutation rate is actually quite low, if the number of infections is very large, it does not matter whether it is low or not, because you have a lot of opportunities to mutate the virus,” she said in an interview with CBC News.

If the transmission rate is high in a partially immunized population, she said, “you will get the mutations selected for this, and you may increasingly avoid the immune system.”

Peacock did say that, so far, there does not seem to be a vaccine-resistant variant.

“Of course, the way to stop these new emergences is to vaccinate and reduce the infection rate,” she said.

“If you are a vaccinated country, [its] At the border, you will feel safe. But most countries have no closed borders.And new variants will continue to appear. with us I don’t know what will happen next with the new variant. “

“Seeing a surge in traumatic effects”

COVAX, a global alliance co-led by the World Health Organization, aims to provide vaccines to the poorest countries in the world. It warned that “the global situation is even more worrying.” It said in a recent statement that if the current vaccine shortage is not resolved, “the consequences could be catastrophic.”

“In this pandemic, we have never seen such an urgent need to focus on the challenges of the future, instead of staying at the sporadic achievements achieved so far,” COVAX said in a statement.

“We have seen the traumatic impact of the COVID-19 surge in South Asia-this surge has also severely affected the global vaccine supply.”

For example, the COVID-19 crisis in India has had a serious impact on the supply of COVAX in the second quarter of this year. By the end of June, the alliance will face a shortage of 190 million doses, it said.

The organization called on world leaders to provide an additional $2 billion to increase vaccine coverage in low-income countries to nearly 30%. It also stated that countries with the largest supply of vaccines should redirect the dose to COVAX.

Amanda Glassman, executive vice president of the Global Development Center, a think tank based in Washington, D.C., said that donating vaccines from high-income countries to low-income countries on the verge of an outbreak can at least help “limit the damage.”

This means donating these vaccines “before the hospital is full-two weeks ago, three weeks ago before they are full”.