Mutant strain needs vigilance, not panic

Panic seems to have overcome Secretary for Food and Health Sophia Chan Siu-chee and many people at large after a man from Dubai tested positive for a Covid mutant, known by the code N501Y, which is more transmissible than its ancestral strain.

It was not the first time N501Y was detected but it was the first time the strain was found in the local community.

The patient, who was asymptomatic, had earlier completed 21 days of hotel quarantine before mixing with locals.

Health officials are not sure how he was infected. It's possible he already had it upon arrival, but a longer than usual incubation period cheated the tests.

It's also possible he was infected during or after he was released from quarantine.

Vigilance is surely needed, but not panic. Also, it is too soon for Chan and her colleagues to jump to conclusions that social distancing restrictions will have to be tightened, given that a roadmap toward greater social distancing freedom was announced only last week.

Labour secretary Law Chi-kwong's warning that flights from the Philippines and other Asian countries where domestic helpers mostly come from may be suspended was worrying and only deepened a sense of panic.

Law could be hinting about what the government is seriously considering. So will flights be suspended from those countries soon?

The government should not rush to this conclusion. The situation does not justify a drastic escalation of those measures bearing in mind that, of the 30 new cases reported yesterday, only one was local.

It is clear that existing quarantine measures have isolated most cases at the air border.

The strange code of N501Y may look scary, but it isn't new, having been first reported in a medical journal in November.

Variants prevalent in Britain and South Africa also share the so-called N501Y spike substitution.

The bad news is that the mutation makes the strain more transmissible - and Britain's latest wave of outbreaks was mainly driven by this.

But the good news is that a small-scale trial has also found that the mRNA-based BioNTech vaccine has a neutralizing effect on both N501 and Y501 viruses.

In the UK example, the resurgence driven by the variant was followed by a cliff-fall in new cases as the number of people getting vaccinated picked up significantly at stepped-up speed.

About half of those already vaccinated were given Pfizer/BioNTech and the other AstraZeneca/Oxford.

The question facing Chan cannot be solved by tightening social distancing alone.

Hopefully, reports of the variant will help to persuade the public to get vaccinated and not otherwise.

Meanwhile, I was bewildered last week when an official announced that BioNTech vaccinations will stop after August.

It's puzzling because the government has ordered 7.5 million doses for half the population. Can they be used up in just over three months?

It would help if experts on the government vaccine committee could compare the incidence rates against actual natural death figures the next time they meet the press to report on further incidents.

Comprehensive information is crucial.