A quick thread on the new variant, pulling together information from news sources, twitter, genomic databases, and word from well-placed peers. https://twitter.com/nickeardleybbc/status/1340263541786501120

The new variant in the UK consists of several mutations in the spike protein, including ΔH69/ΔV70 deletions & other receptor binding domain mutations such as N501Y.

The variant is described here in this pre-print from @GuptaR_lab.

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.12.14.422555v2

The ΔH69/ΔV70 variant continues to increase quite rapidly as a proportion of overall positives (roughly doubling in the last 2 to three days), and is apparently now the dominant strain in test positives in some regions.

Extensive efforts have gone into enhanced surveillance for the ΔH69/ΔV70 deletion with and without RBD mutations, and it is good that we are aware of this.

There is a need for calm and rational thinking, and more evidence is needed.

But the early data is certainly concerning