The Delta variant of Covid, which first discovered in India, has been circulating wildly through much of the world.
Developing and developed countries alike have not escaped its wrath, however, immunization rates remain poorly low in much of the former, causing concerns of overwhelmed healthcare systems. At the same time, a new variant is spreading like a forest fire.
As the MailOnline cited, the new Lambda covid variant has sneaked into Australia, which has historically kept coronavirus out of its shores through stringent border controls.
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Nevertheless, the country’s vaccination rates are low, making it particularly vulnerable to new variants.
The Lambda strain is on the WHO radar. It has been detected so far in at least 30 countries.
It is believed to be from Peru, which has represented almost 81% of the country’s workload since April.
South American doctors fear that it is more transmissible than any other variant, given the speed with which it has spread to the country over the past four months.
Professor Pablo Tsukayama, Cayetano Heredia University, said the strain has “exploded” in Peru, with the new variant responsible for 82 percent of current cases.
He told the FT that it made up just one in every 200 samples back in December, when it was first detected.
“That would suggest its rate of transmission is higher than any other variant,” Professor Tsukayama said.
The strain, also known to scientists as C.37, was marked as a “variant of interest” by the WHO last month because of its high transmissibility.
However, the jury is currently out on whether it will overtake the Delta variant.
Coronavirus-tracking researchers have yet to establish the virus is any more transmissible than existing strains.
Although there are no sigs the Lambda variant is spreading in Australia, other health experts have echoed fears about its potential.
Dr Jeffrey Barrett, head of Britain’s Covid-19 Genomics Initiative at the Welcome Sanger Institute, told the FT:
Lambda has a unique pattern of seven mutations in the spike protein that the virus uses to infect human cells.
Researchers are particularly intrigued by one mutation called L452Q, which is similar to the L452R mutation to contribute to the high infectiousness of the Delta variant.
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