New COVID variant will likely come to Minnesota, U of M expert says

Nov. 26—Americans and Minnesotans should expect that the troubling new coronavirus variant emerging from southern Africa will come here, an infectious disease expert from the University of Minnesota said Friday.

But exactly what that means for public health and the ongoing world of COVID remains unclear, said Mike Osterholm, director of the U's Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy.

"This is a stay-tuned moment," Osterholm said in an interview Friday.

LIKELY WORLDWIDE, BUT ...

Based on what's been seen from other highly transmissible variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, Osterholm said, "We can, unfortunately, anticipate that it will spread around the world."

However, that's not really the most important question, he said of the variant first detected in South Africa known as B.1.1.529, which has rapidly led to travel restrictions and put health officials around the globe on alert.

"The question is whether it will compete with delta," he said, referring to the variant currently making up nearly all cases in the United States.

Other examples of troublesome variants that spread worldwide include beta, which was also detected in South Africa, and gamma, which emerged from Brazil. But neither of those two variants became dominant, Osterholm noted, so the war against the pandemic — and especially the effectiveness of vaccines — aren't generally being waged against those variants.

Osterholm said concern over the new variant becoming dominant is well-placed. "The initial data from South Africa is not great."

But there's still another important question: Will the new variant be cause more serious illness and death?

"We don't know yet," Osterholm cautioned. "There a lot left to be learned."

It's chock full of mutations that many experts believe make it primed to cause illness and evade immunity — but such beliefs are essentially theoretical at this point.