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>> Thank you for joining us today.
My name's Paul Rothman.
I'm the Dean and CEO here at Johns Hopkins Medicine,
and I'm here today with Heba Mostafa,
who's help lead our effort in developing tests for COVID
from the very beginning.
Heba's helped us developed the first test
and is now doing a ton of work around the SARS-CoV-2 virus,
the cause of COVID.
She is an assistant professor here
in the Department of Pathology,
as well as the Director of the Molecular and Virology Lab,
here at Johns Hopkins Hospital.
And today, we're gonna pick Heba's brain
about the COVID variants that we're seeing,
and what that means possibly for the pandemic.
Heba, thanks for joining us today.
>> Thank you so much, Dr. Rothman, for the invitation,
happy to be here today.
>> So, you know, we hear, we're reading a lot
about the virus obviously, and a lot about variants.
What is a variant?
>> So, SARS-CoV-2, or the virus that causes COVID-19,
this is a virus that has a genome, which is made of RNA,
which means that this virus can actually make mistakes
in its genome.
And this is what means,
this is what variant means.
So, those are some mistakes that happen due to,
secondary to this virus replication, that are not fixed.
And this is not uncommon for an RNA virus,
so it is kind of expected.
>> Why do people care about these variants?
>> So the main concern,
I think about it as two different aspects,
either an increase in transmission
or an enhanced ability, or ability of the virus,
to invade the immune system.
>> Do we have variants that we think that's true of,
that seem to spread more rapidly,
or more transmissible than other variants?
>> Yeah, so, so far there are three
that are raising major concern.
There is one variant that
that was detected in United Kingdom.
It is now famous of the UK variant.
There is a second variant that was,
that emerged in South Africa,
which is now known as the South African variant.
And a third, which is known as the Brazilian variant.
The three evidently more transmissible,
and there is also some evidence
that they might be, at least two of them,
they might be escaping some of the immune responses.
>> There's three variants,
and you think that they can transmit more,
which means, more people will get the virus?
>> Yes. >> And I assume
that's a bad thing, am I right?
>> Correct, so it is a bad thing,
but there are now other things
that makes, that should make us more optimistic.
We have actually effective vaccines.
So the situation is different from December,
or I should say, maybe, September,
is when the first of those variants of concern emerged.
The spikes have been happening around December time frame.
But now, we actually have vaccines
that can be scaled up to limit the spread
of these variants of concern.
Even though we think that they might be escaping
some of the immune responses,
the data now shows that they actually,
the vaccines that we have, are effective.
So, it's kind of now a race between vaccinating
and the spread of those variants of concern.
>> So, for the average person here,
what should they do to help try to block
the spread of these variants?
>> So, to me, there are three main things that we should do.
We should keep infection control measures in place.
Wear masks, social distancing,
and all those measures that limit the spread.
The second point is to vaccinate
as many people as quickly as possible.
And then, the third, is actually our responsibility
of keeping the surveillance going
to look for those variants of concern,
and be proactive and act on this quickly.
There's an important point of optimism,
which is that those vaccines
are actually flexible to modifications.
So if there's an actual variant of concern,
we can start,
start changing or adding those new variants
to the vaccine and to give booster doses,
which is actually, a few companies
are looking at this right now for those variants of concern.
>> Well, Heba, first of all,
thank you for all your work,
you've been leading our effort on testing
for these viruses since a year,
and now, you've lead the idea and identification
of these variants.
So, on behalf of all of us,
thank you for what you've done during this pandemic,
and thank you for helping
to explain these variants to us.
I've learned a lot. I really appreciate it.
So, keep it up, and we're eager to follow you,
and make sure that we're not seeing bad variants
here in Maryland, so thank you for your time.
And for everyone tuning in, thank you, and stay safe.
We really appreciate you tuning in with us today.
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