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SINGAPORE – Researchers in Singapore have discovered a new variant of Covid-19 that causes less severe infections, according to a new study in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet.
This could provide new avenues for vaccine and therapeutic development, experts say.
The latest reported variant of the Sars-CoV-2 virus which causes Covid-19 emerged in Wuhan, China early in the pandemic and was exported to Singapore and Taiwan, according to the study by researchers in various institutions, including the National Centre for Infectious Diseases (NCID) and the Duke-NUS Medical School.
It was detected in a cluster of cases here in Jan and Feb. The researchers said in the study that patients infected with the variant, which has a 382 nucleotide deletion, were observed to have had better clinical outcomes relative to those infected by viruses without this deletion.
A lower proportion of them, for example, had hypoxia (where the body is short of oxygen) requiring supplemental oxygen, when compared with those infected with the wild-type virus.
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