The delta strain threatens progress in the EU

The delta strain of the coronavirus that has gripped Great Britain has also become dominant in Portugal, causing clusters in Germany, France and Spain, forcing European medical officials to issue a warning that additional measures are needed to curb its spread.

Although the new strain, which first appeared in India where more than a million people died from covid, still represents only a small part of the total number of infected in continental Europe, it is spreading very quickly, an analysis conducted by the "Financial Times" showed. . The delta strain represents about 96 percent of the total number of infected in Portugal, over 20 percent in Italy and about 16 percent in Belgium, according to the FT.

The rise in the number of infected has raised fears that the delta strain could halt the progress the EU has made in the past two months in containing the infection.

"We are in the process of suppressing the virus and suppressing the pandemic, and we must not allow the delta variant to overtake us," French Health Minister Olivier Veran said last Sunday.

While the Portuguese authorities are fighting against a worrying increase in the number of infected people, it was announced yesterday that more than half of the new cases of covid-19 are caused by the delta strain. Portugal has recorded over 1000 new cases for four days in a row and the number of daily new cases has returned to the level of February when the country was locked down.

The National Institute of Public Health announced that the delta strain was recorded in 60 percent of those infected in Lisbon, and that this figure was below 15 percent in the north of the country.

About 2,5 million of the total population of 10 million in Portugal are now fully vaccinated against covid-19, reminds Reuters. Although there has been a slight increase in hospitalizations in recent days, there has been no increase in the number of deaths since the elderly, more vulnerable people have been vaccinated. The recent rise in the number of infections comes about a month after the country, which depends on tourism, opened up to visitors from other EU countries and Britain.

In Britain, until recently, June 21 was practically considered "liberation day" when all restrictions will be lifted. However, on June 14, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson dashed those hopes by extending the restrictive measures for another month precisely because of the increase in the number of infected, hospitalized and admissions to intensive care units.

9 new cases of the disease and six deaths were recorded in Britain yesterday. Although lower than in previous days, the number of new cases indicates an increasing trend in recent weeks as a result of the spread of the delta strain.

In addition to being more rapidly transmitted, the delta strain appears to cause a more severe form of the disease. The "Economist" writes that based on laboratory experiments, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention believes that both problems are related to the ability of this variant of the virus to bypass antibody defenses, regardless of whether the antibodies were produced by a vaccine or by a previous infection. The Institute of Public Health reported that the risk of hospitalization from the delta variant increases between 32 and 289 percent compared to the alpha strain. This also means that it is more deadly.

Discoveries related to vaccines are less alarming, the "Economist" points out. Compared to the alpha mutation, the delta strain reduced protection from symptomatic infection from 50 percent to 33 after one dose of Pfizer or AstraZeneca's vaccine, but after the second dose protection decreased from 88 to only 80 percent, with a tendency to increase over time.

In addition to vaccination, the spread of clusters caused by the delta strain in the EU will also depend on people's behavior now that most restrictions have been lifted, experts say.

"If the vaccination goes at a good pace with some non-pharmaceutical interventions such as wearing masks indoors, I think we can still suppress the circulation of the virus during the summer," said French virologist Bruno Lina. "This variant will crowd out the others, we have to keep that in mind, but that doesn't mean it will lead to a new epidemiological wave."

Some scientists fear that the delta strain has already spread, but that it has not been detected since some parts of continental Europe do not carry out the genetic sequencing of the virus, which is necessary for the identification of strains. While over 500 Sars-Cov-000 genomes have been sequenced in Britain, Germany, France and Spain have sequenced around 2, 130 and 000, respectively.

"It's expensive, time-consuming and neglected," said Antoine Flaholt, director of the Institute for Global Health at the University of Geneva.

Denmark, however, sequenced a large number of cases and still identified a small percentage of delta strain infections, despite that variant of the virus arriving in Denmark around the same time as Britain.

Experts say this could partly be explained by demographics and population movements, including the number of cases imported into the country from regions where the delta strain is dominant, such as India, as well as living conditions in communities.

The difference in the rate of spread of the delta strain in European countries remains a "mystery", Jeff Barrett, director of the covid-19 genome initiative at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Cambridge, told the FT.

However, experts believe that wherever the delta strain appears, it becomes dominant over time. The key, they claim, is to increase the number of fully vaccinated people and at the same time slow down the transmission of the virus as much as possible.

"We have to send a clear message," said Lina. "This is not over".