The Quezon City government on Wednesday said the city has one COVID-19 variant that originated from Brazil.
At a virtual media briefing, Mayor Joy Belmonte said Quezon City has 18 cases of COVID-19 variants, of which 13 of them were of B.1.1.7 variant from the United Kingdom (UK variant), four of the B.1.351 variant from South Africa (South African variant) and one Brazilian variant.
“The way I see things are, the presence of these variants has something to do with the increase of cases,” she said.
But the city’s Epidemiology and Surveillance Unit chief, Dr. Rolly Cruz, dialed back the statement about the Brazil variant, saying what they found might be different from the Brazil variant, according to the Department of Health.
Belmonte said it would take 10 days to find out if the sample sent to the Philippine Genome Center is a variant.
“The mindset that we would want to adopt here in Quezon City is an assumption that every case now is a variant. We will no longer wait for the (Philippine) Genome Center to tell if a case is a variant. We now treat every case we find as a variant,” she said.
Quezon City has reported 2,100 new active COVID-19 cases as of March 9, 8 p.m. of March 9.
It has now a total number of 34,591 with 31,663 recovered cases and 858 deaths.
She said even though the national government has not said so, she thought the situation in Quezon City was “alarming” because the city’s positivity rate was at 9.3 percent.
As of Wednesday, 14 areas were under lockdown with the latest being parts of Barangay Central and Barangay Krus na Ligas.
She said quarantine classifications are already “obsolete” and no longer helpful.
“These different classifications for me are already obsolete. As you can see when we say general community quarantine, we are not really adhering to GCQ in its purest form, just the same as that of the modified GCQ. I find these classifications not very helpful anymore,” she said. “I would prefer to just use the word restrictions,.”
Meanwhile, the DOH has tallied 58 cases of the South African variant, and 118 cases of the UK variant in the Philippines.
In a post on the Johns Hopkins Hospital website, two experts on SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, discuss what is known about these new variants.
Stuart Ray, M.D., vice chair of medicine for data integrity and analytics, of Johns Hopkins University, notes in hopkinsmedicine.org that one mutated version of the coronavirus was detected in southeastern England in September 2020.
That variant, now known as B.1.1.7, quickly became the most common version of the coronavirus in the United Kingdom, accounting for about 60% of new COVID-19 cases in December. It is now the predominant form of the coronavirus in some countries.
Different variants have emerged in Brazil, California and other areas.
A variant called B.1.351, which first appeared in South Africa, may have the ability to re-infect people who have recovered from earlier versions of the coronavirus. It might also be somewhat resistant to some of the coronavirus vaccines in development.
Still, other vaccines currently being tested appear to offer protection from severe disease in people infected with B.1.351.
The variant known as B.1.351, which was identified in South Africa, is getting a closer look from researchers, whose early data show that the COVID-19 vaccine from Oxford-AstraZeneca provided “minimal” protection from that version of the coronavirus.
Those who became sick from the B.1.351 coronavirus variant after receiving the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine experienced mild or moderate illness.
The B.1.351 variant has not been shown to cause more severe illness than earlier versions. But there is a chance that it could give people who survived the original coronavirus another round of mild or moderate COVID-19.
Researchers studying placebo (non-vaccine) recipients in the South African COVID-19 vaccine trial by Novavax compared subgroups of participants who did or did not have antibodies indicating prior COVID-19.
Those who did have the antibodies most likely were infected with older variants of SARS-CoV-2. They found that having recovered from COVID-19 did not protect against being sickened again at a time when the B.1.351 variant was spreading there.
