A new kind of COVID-19 is now spreading across Europe

An international team of scientists monitoring the virus through its genetic mutations describes in a paper the extraordinary spread of a new version of the virus called 20A. EU1.

Their work suggests that people who returned from vacation in Spain played a key role in the transmission of the virus across Europe, asking whether the second wave affecting Europe might have been milder if the controls at airports and other transport joints were better and more severe.

Because each version of the virus has its own genetic signature, it can be traced where it originated.

“From 20A spread. EU1, it is clear that preventive measures have often not been enough to prevent further transmission of new strains of the virus this summer”, Emma Hodcroft, an evolutionary geneticist at Basel University and leading author of the study that has not yet been published, said.

Scientific teams in Switzerland and Spain are now rushing to examine the behavior of a new strain of the virus to determine whether it can be more lethal or contagious than other species.

Hodcroft stressed that 20A. EU1 is different from any version of the Sars-Cov-2 virus, known earlier.

Teams are working especially with virology labs to determine if 20A. EU1 carries a particular mutation in the protein that the virus uses to enter human cells, which can change its behavior.

The new version of the virus, which has six known genetic mutations, emerged among agricultural workers in northeastern Spain in June and spread rapidly to the local population, the study said.

Tanja Stadler, a professor of computer evolution at the University of Technology, Science and Management (ETH) in Cyril, which was part of the project, said the analysis of virus samples taken from across Europe in recent weeks showed that they stem from the same version.

“We can see that the virus has been imported in several countries several times, and many of those inputs have spread to the population”, Stadler said.

Innaki Cosmos, head of the consortium SeqCovid-Spain, who studies the virus and is co-author of the study, said a variant, assisted by the initial super-enlargement event, could quickly become widespread.

Researchers concluded that the dangerous “bringing of tourists to Spain, such as ignoring social distance guidelines, helped spread this new version of the virus.

Research has shown that the new version of the virus is present in eight out of 10 cases of infection in Great Britain, 80 percent of Spain's cases, 60 percent in Ireland, and up to 40 percent in Switzerland and France.

Over the spring, blockades helped bring the early wave of coronary infection under control. But the virus has spread rapidly throughout Europe in recent weeks, forcing national leaders to impose new restrictions.