Back in the fall, Tom Wenseleers made a bold claim on Twitter. He tweeted that the new coronavirus variant emerging in the U.K. was …
Back in the fall, Tom Wenseleers made a bold claim on Twitter. He tweeted that the new coronavirus variant emerging in the U.K. was more transmissible — or could spread more quickly — than over versions of the virus. “I posted a graph [on Twitter] showing the U.K. variant had a transmission advantage over the other types of the virus,” says Wenseleers, who’s an evolutionary biologist at the University of Leuven in Belgium. At first, many scientists didn’t believe his analysis. Many people thought the big COVID surge in England was due to holiday travel and shopping, he says. But after many follow-up studies, Wenseleers was proven correct. The variant from U.K., called B.1.1.7, is indeed more transmissible and likely the most contagious version of the virus known. Now Wenseleers has performed similar analyses on data from India, and he’s feeling a bit of a deja vu. “Based on this data, the new variant from India has a very big transmission or growth advantage,” even over B.1.1.7, he says.
