Alliance for Pandemic Preparedness

December 23, 2020

Early Empirical Assessment of the N501Y Mutant Strains of SARS-CoV-2 in the United Kingdom October to November 2020

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[pre-print; not peer-reviewed] Leung at al. estimate that the SARS-CoV-2 lineage that has rapidly become the most dominant in the United Kingdom is 75% more transmissible than the previous lineage, potentially due to a mutation in the receptor binding domain of the spike protein. Their estimates suggest that the R0 for the mutated 501Y strain is about 1.75-times that of the unmuted 501N strain. They note that this variant does not appear to have spread significantly outside of the UK at this point, although sporadic spread of the mutation has occurred in Wales, Australia, Spain, and the United States without the variant becoming as dominant in those places. They also report that a new 501Y variant has emerged and spread rapidly in South Africa, but it appears to be genetically distinct from the UK variant, suggesting the importance of further epidemiological and genetic studies of each mutation.

Leung et al. (Dec 22, 2020). Early Empirical Assessment of the N501Y Mutant Strains of SARS-CoV-2 in the United Kingdom October to November 2020. Pre-print downloaded Dec 23 from https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.12.20.20248581