It's Tuesday, January five. I'm Oscar Emiras from the Daily Dive podcast in Los Angeles, and this is reopening America. The new variant of the coronavirus that was found in the UK has now made its way into the US. The mutated virus is more transmissible, but not more severe, and has been found in Colorado, California, Florida, and most recently New York. People infected with the new variant are thought to have greater concentrations of the virus and their
noses and throats. A poor Va Mondavilli reporter at The New York Times joins us for how COVID is spreading faster. Thanks for joining us, Apporva, thanks for having me. We are finding out a little bit more about this more contagious variant of the coronavirus that begun circulating in the UK. It's now in the United States, in Colorado, California, Florida, and we just heard that the first case was found in New York of this variant. Obviously this was coming
from the UK. They're imposing very strict lockdown rules because of this, probably the most stricts since the whole pandemic first began, So this new variant is becoming the predominant form it already has in England, and they think that will soon happen here in the United States as well. So apt to help us walk through what we're learning about this, why is this new variant more contagious? Let me take a step back and say that there are a lot of variants of this virus, and that's natural.
Any virus always picks up new mutations along the way. What's concerning about this one is that it seems to have picked up mutations one or more that make it more transmissible. It spreads much better between people than previous versions. So this is, you know, a huge worry because already the numbers in the United States and everywhere else are so horrible. The hospitals are already overflowing. And what we don't know is exactly how much more transmissible this is.
There are some estimates, but we don't know exactly how it became more transmissible. We don't know exactly how much, but the numbers speak for themselves. Everywhere it has shown up, the number of people infected has shot up really fast. The early estimates said that it was maybe about more transmissible others saying that could be about fifty but you're right, we still have to kind of let it play out unfortunately a little bit to see exactly where that goes.
One of the good things is that we're seeing is that we don't think that it is any causes any more severe complications. You know, people don't get any sicker per se, but there will be more deaths just by the fact that it is more transmissible. There's gonna be more people getting sick and more people at risk of
worse symptoms. Yeah, and it's not just COVID, right, I mean, there will definitely be more people who get sick from COVID, more people who die from COVID, just because there are more people getting infected, but also as hospitals continue to stay overwhelmed and probably for much longer because of this new variant, a lot of people who need care for other things like cancer and diabetes and heart disease and everything else, all of those people will all have to
wait for care and who knows how much damage we'll see, you know, with those diseases. So some of the preliminary evidence from Britain says that this new variant could infect cells with greater efficiency, There could be more viral load in people's noses and throats. It may not travel all the way to the lungs, but if it stays in the nose and throat, you know, when people are talking, sneezing, coughing, all that, that's what makes it a little more transmissible.
You know, this is one of the possible things that they're looking at. Right. It's a theory at this point still, but it's one possible explanation for why you might be seeing that people are more contagious but not getting sicker. And as you pointed out, that could be because they have more virus in their nose and throat, which makes them more contagious, but it's not getting into their lungs, so they're not getting as sick. But you know, we
don't know this for sure yet. There are some studies that have shown there's some evidence that people who get this variant um as opposed to other ones have a higher viraul load, but we still need to see more data on that. Yeah, one of the doctors that you
spoke to put it pretty accurately. It seems like currently risky activities become more risky with this new variant, and that's why we're seeing lockdowns in the UK, we're seeing more talk about other modified lockdowns in the United States, because they're just trying to shut it down as best
they could. And it proves the point really that you know, you should still continue the social distancing, the mask wearing, all the precautions we've been hearing to avoid these risky behaviors in every other way that doesn't have to do with that greater transmissibility. This variant is behaving exactly like the previous versions, So it's all the same precautionary measures that we already know work. Wearing a mask, washing our hands, making sure that the rooms are well ventilated, or that
we're only interacting outdoors. All of those things will still help, but we'll need to follow those things much more strictly, much more rigorously than we have been, And that's kind of a depressing thought. And also you wonder how well will we do that people are already unwilling to follow those guidelines and are sick of the pandemic. How open will they be to even stricter guidelines and lockdowns given where we are as a country. Yeah, that's definitely going
to be a tough fight. I wanted to return back to the mutations that we were talking about the very beginning. We know all viruses mutate as they go along. This variant that has popped up right now has twenty three mutations. They say, seventeen of those appeared very suddenly. But just talk about how this process plays out and what we're
finding out about this variant. Yeah, I mean, as you pointed out, there are twenty three mutations compared to the original strain in Wuhan, the original variant, but since then, you know, it's picked up a lot of mutations. As I mentioned, there are a lot of different variants. The thing that's really strange about this one is how many it has compared to the most recent version of it, and eight of those are in a part of the
virus that all of the vaccines are designed against. So that's a little bit of a concern, and one of one set of mutations in particular, has been shown now to actually decrease how well the virus response to the immune response created by the vaccines. It's not that the vaccines won't work, but they will be a little bit less effective. And so the worry now is that if
you have this variant spreading among people really fast. Every single person that infects is an opportunity for it to collect more mutations, and if it collects even more mutations that make the vaccines even less effective, that's going to be a problem. Well, one year into this whole thing, the coronavirus continues, the pandemic continues to move very fast, so we'll have to keep monitoring how this variant changes things,
if anything. A Porva Mondavelli, reporter at the New York Times, thank you very much for joining us, Thanks for having me. I'm ascar Emiras and this has been opening America. Don't forget the effort today's big news stories. You can check me out on the Daily Dive podcast every Monday through Friday. So follow us an I Heart radio or wherever you get your podcast