over 2 million americans are receiving vaccinations every day fueling hope the
end of the pandemic is near but since the sars kovi 2 virus emerged in wuhan china 14 months ago
over 100 million people worldwide have been infected and with each infection the
virus has had the chance to mutate into genetic offspring called variants one of those variants
first identified in the uk has spread across the u.s and is estimated to be 50 percent more
transmissible than the original virus and likely more deadly nationwide covid19 cases have fallen
but public health officials are warning if these variants continue to spread
they could trigger a new surge of infections the story will continue in a moment
news the uk variant had reached american shores came last december at the university of
california san diego you guys know the routine the variant was found as part of an extensive
coronavirus surveillance and testing system that has kept nearly 25 thousand people living
and working on campus thank you vending machines designed to dispense candy bars
now offer nasal swabs for covet testing and golf carts go on daily runs collecting samples taken
from wastewater oh there you go do you see it sure so now if we pick this up environmental engineer
smurfy kartikayan showed us how robots placed near over 300 student dorms and research buildings
suck up sewer samples looking for early evidence someone might be infected with the virus
and if there's a positive what happens if there's a positive and they will send targeted notices
saying you're building the wastewater has been positive and please go get tested
many positive samples from wastewater and nasal swabs are sent here to nearby scripps research
where infectious disease researcher christian anderson's lab performs genetic sequencing to
identify any variations it's really important that we keep an eye on the virus how is it evolving
how is it transmitting how is it changing genetic sequences from around the world are
constantly being analyzed in a database called neck strain that anderson and other scientists
use to visualize how variants are spreading these are beautiful colors but what am i looking at
you can think of this as a family tree and what we have is down here this is the first one in
wuhan viruses mutate over time you see mutations coming up and that's when you start getting these
branching patterns so then you have sisters and brothers here and then you have ants and uncles
and what's the practical use of having a tree like this the practical use is that somebody like me
can go in and look at like how is this all related since the original virus was first identified in
december 2019 thousands of variants have been documented anderson says scientists are keeping
a close eye on three of them they call variance of concern and that's the uk variant which was you
can see here was identified dates back to about september of last year and then all of a sudden
you get a lot of these and that's because it's more transmissible so transmissible the centers
for disease control has projected the uk variant will be the dominant strain in the u.s in the next
month the variants from brazil seen in red and south africa seen in orange have already spread
to dozens of countries including the u.s variants arise because the sars-ko v2 virus is constantly
making copies of itself as it replicates tiny mistakes or mutations can occur in its genetic
code they're rare and usually insignificant but once in a while one or more mutations team up
to create a more dangerous variant of the virus we are reading evolution's lab notebook
every time one of these pops up it's telling us exactly how evolution benefits at the expense
of the fitness of humankind dr francis collins director of the national institutes of health is
a geneticist who 20 years ago oversaw the decoding of the human genome he says he's surprised by how
much this virus is evolving why are the variants of concern that we're seeing in places like the
united kingdom south africa and brazil of such concern it turns out that some of these mutations
actually change the behavior of this virus in a way that makes it more infectious or more
serious and the evidence is that for both the b117 which is primarily seen in the uk but increasingly
in the us and the south africa and b1351 that they are more transmissible they're just really
successful we're seeing evolution in motion i think it's been rarely seen as clearly as right
now how evolution works in that way it was pretty predictable what wasn't predictable for me anyway
was that there would be so many copies of this virus that even a slow evolutionary
process could in just a matter of a few months produce some viruses that we're worried about
and there's so many copies because it's a pandemic and it's been very successful in infecting
millions and millions of people these samples were from the patient's lung an early clue about
how the virus was mutating came last summer at the university of pittsburgh medical center
infectious disease specialist dr gotti haidar says a cancer patient with a compromised immune system
came in with a covid19 infection that persisted for over 70 days far beyond the typical few weeks
we had no idea at the time that people could still be actively infectious for that long
and it really wasn't until after he passed away that we started running some additional testing
on samples that he had allowed us to collect from him when he was alive
and that's when we found that the virus really quickly began to develop all these deletions
and mutations throughout the patient's life this electron microscope image shows a sample
taken from the patient's windpipe tiny spheres looked like the original virus from wuhan china
but genetic sequencing revealed a different story there were small gaps where information should be
irish-born university of pittsburgh virologist paul dupre says the uk
variant has some of these same deletions leading some scientists to believe it may have started in
an immunocompromised patient when you have a patient who is sick for so long there's
the opportunity for the virus to replicate and replicate and replicate and every time a virus
has that opportunity to replicate there's also an opportunity for it to make a mistake right
and that's how viruses change those mistakes give the virus just a little bit of a competitive edge
for example kind of get into a cell better duprey says yes he used this animation to show us how
it starts with the spike protein seen in red which the virus uses to latch onto and enter
a human cell so if you've been infected you'll make antibodies these blue molecules that bind
to the outside of the virus spike and what they do is they block the virus getting into
the cell they can't bind the receptor now here's a variant the yellow illustrating the variant the
antibodies can no longer bind the virus is able to attach to that receptor latch on and bingo
that person gets infected is there anything we can do to stop the virus from mutating so much
we can certainly stop it making as many mutations by stopping it infecting as many people
if we block its transmission if we wear a mask if we get vaccinated if we do social distancing
so there's a practical thing that we can do but physically biologically is there something
that we can do is there a magic bullet that we can shoot at it that stops at making mutations
nope to understand the threat posed by mutations public health experts are studying the brazilian
city of manaus last spring kovitz swept through the population leaving about 70 percent infected
as a result some researchers believed the city had reached herd immunity but then starting this past
december epidemiologists suspect thousands were re-infected with the brazilian variant
hospitals there were overwhelmed health officials reported up to 150 deaths a day
and a recent study suggests the variant is more infectious than earlier strains and may be better
at evading antibodies we had a cluster of cases at columbia university irving medical center dr david
ho known for his groundbreaking hiv research is now working to identify which variants are present
in new york city since january his team has analyzed over 2 000 nasal swabs taken from
people who had tested positive for covid19 what was unexpected was there were only sporadic cases
the uk brazilian and south african variants but instead we noticed that we had a homegrown variant
something new something new that was dominating uh and rising very rapidly how rapidly is it growing
it's over 20 percent over 20 percent so that's a rapid rise in the last couple of months
dr ho says the new york city variant is doubling roughly every two weeks and city health officials
announced this past week they found the variant in 39 percent of the covet 19 samples they recently
sequenced dr ho is concerned because that variant shares a key mutation with one found
in south africa several studies have looked at the effectiveness of the three vaccines authorized in
the u.s against that south african variant both in laboratory tests and clinical trials the vaccines
appear to be somewhat less effective at eliciting an immune response or preventing infection
but the companies anticipate the vaccines will still provide protection from severe disease from
that south african variant what people are worried about is i got a vaccine i thought i was safe and
now you're talking about all these variants where am i i'm in the same boat i got vaccinated and i
felt protected for a while until we realized there was so much of the homegrown varian in new york
how do you put this in perspective for people who are watching this right now i think we have to be
a bit concerned but that doesn't say the vaccines don't work even in south africa the vaccines
still work to some extent it's just not as highly protective as we had against the original strain
in addition vaccine may not protect against infection but may protect against disease or death
dr collins says so far the pfizer and modern vaccines appear effective against the uk variant
and this past week a small laboratory study found the pfizer vaccine elicited the same
strong immune response against the brazilian variant as against the original virus drug
companies say they are working to retool their vaccines and create booster shots as needed to
keep up with the variance what keeps you up at night in terms of the variance down the line
if i have an anxiety it's something worse than the south african variant is out there that will get
to the point where the vaccines no longer appear to be fully protective against a bad outcome
and that will certainly drive us then to do a redesign of the vaccines as quick as we can
recently a variant has been found in new york city that has some of the characteristics of
the variant of concern found in south africa i'm not on the surface of it overly alarmed about that
but it's going to deserve a real lab experiment to make sure that our vaccines would still provide
immunity against that there's a ton of political economic and other pressure to have these vaccines
be successful is the government committed to being totally transparent about these variants about
whether or not the vaccines are working or is there some kind of a filter
there cannot be a filter i will not stand for that neither will dr fauci and absolutely if we
ever come across as having the truth of the matter distorted by what is politically or
economically convenient then we will have lost the public trust dr collins says right now we
have a window of opportunity a little poke in your arm ready and that americans need to get
vaccinated avoid large gatherings and wear masks to prevent the virus from spreading
and mutating even more to continue to hear that this isn't over yet
has got to be a hard thing for all of us i don't want to sound so pessimistic though we are making
amazing progress we just got to hang on and don't blow it at the end if you're the guy running for
the finish line don't trip right there on the 10 yard line try to get all the way to the goal
we we can see it we're gonna get there but this is not the moment to relax or stop running hard
a year of covet 19 reporting when you think that a year ago we said that
as many as 20 people have died and now it's more than half a million at sixty
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