A scientist has said the new variant of coronavirus may infect more children.
According to a scientist on the government’s New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats advisory group (NervTag), the new strain of the deadly virus "has a higher propensity to infect children".
Speaking at the NervTag Q&A briefing on the new variant, hosted by Science Media Centre, Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College London said there was strong evidence the new mutant strain is 50% more transmissible than the previous virus.
He added: “We will need to gather more data to see how it behaves going forward.
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“There are other epidemiologically interesting trends with virus, there is a hint that it has a higher propensity to infect children … but we haven’t established any sort of causality on that, but we can see that in the data.”
Cheshire Live reports Peter Horby, chairman of NervTag, told a Science Media Centre briefing: “This afternoon more than a dozen scientists met again, with some new faces who weren’t at the Friday meeting.
“We went through all the data again and the additional analysis, both on bigger data sets and using different methods.
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“The conclusion this afternoon is that we now have high confidence that this variant does have a transmission advantage over other virus variants that are currently in the UK.”
The news comes as chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance said there will be a spike in Covid cases after an "inevitable period of mixing" over Christmas.
He told a Downing Street press conference: "Nervtag (New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Group) met again today, a lot of work was done over the weekend trying to bring in more groups to look at the problem and to look at the new data that's become available."
