Japan is working to isolate and analyse a new variant of the coronavirus detected in four people who arrived from Brazil, a health ministry official said.
Japan announced the detection of the new variant on Sunday, but officials have been at pains to emphasise there is no evidence yet that it is any more transmissible or dangerous than others.
“In order to further analyse the variant, we need to isolate it first,” a health ministry official told AFP.
“It’s hard to say right now when we can release the details,” he said, adding the process could take weeks or months.
The variant was found in two adults and two children who arrived in Japan on 2 January from Brazil.
The health ministry said one of the four, a man in his 40s, has been hospitalised with breathing difficulties, while a woman and male child developed mild symptoms and a female child was asymptomatic.
The World Health Organization said it has been notified by Japan about the new variant, warning “the more the virus spreads, the higher the chance of new changes to the virus”.
Experts note that viruses mutate regularly and not all mutations make the disease easier to catch or more serious.
But the discovery of a variant in the UK that is significantly more transmissible, and a second strain in South Africa, has raised concerns about whether a vaccine-resistant version could eventually develop.
Japan’s National Institute of Infectious Diseases has said there are some similarities between the newly detected strain and the ones found in the UK and South Africa.
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Meanwhile, scientists at the WHO warned that mass vaccinations would not bring about herd immunity to the coronavirus this year, even as one leading producer boosted its production forecast.
Infections numbers are surging around the world, especially in Europe where nations have been forced to ramp up virus restrictions even as vaccines are rolled out.
The WHO’s chief scientist Soumya Swaminathan warned that it would take time to produce and give enough shots to halt the spread of the virus, which has infected more than 90 million people worldwide with deaths approaching two million.
“We are not going to achieve any levels of population immunity or herd immunity in 2021,” she said, stressing the need to maintain physical distancing, hand-washing and mask-wearing.
Experts are also concerned about the rapid spread of new variants of the virus, such as the one first detected in Britain which is feared to be significantly more transmissible.
German company BioNTech, which partnered with Pfizer to produce the first vaccine approved in the West, said it could produce millions more doses than originally expected this year, boosting the production forecast from 1.3 to two billion.
The announcement was a boost to countries struggling to deliver the shots, but the company also warned that Covid-19 would “likely become an endemic disease”, with vaccines needed to fight new variants and a “naturally waning immune response”.
Officials in Russia said they would trial a one-dose version of country’s Sputnik V vaccine as part of efforts to provide a stopgap solution for badly hit countries.
India, with the world’s second-highest number of infections, is set to begin giving shots to its 1.3 billion people from Saturday in a colossal and complex undertaking.
US President-elect Joe Biden, who has pledged to devote all available resources to fight the pandemic, received his second vaccine dose on Monday.