Is a new variant driving India’s coronavirus catastrophe?
"scientists have urged against leaping to conclusions about the extent to which the variant alone is responsible for the dizzying rise in cases in the past few weeks"
https://on.ft.com/3dUmK1v  via @FT

Important FT piece which suggests that the speed of the COVID surge in India is less to do with mutations & more "driven by other factors, including its low vaccination rate & limited hospital capacity, as well as the tolerance of large political and religious gatherings."

“Despite the alarming spike in new cases with India’s second wave, there’s simply not enough evidence to place the blame on variants,” said Nancy Jaser, an infectious disease analyst at GlobalData, an analytics company that tracks mutations.

“You have to look at these things without panicking,” Barrett said. “The fact that [the variant that originated in India] has not yet spread [widely] in the UK, even though it has been on British shores since February, suggests it’s not likely to be as transmissible as B.1.1.7.”

"References in the media and online to “double mutations” in the B. 1.617 variant were “inaccurate, have no specific meaning and should be avoided”, Peacock added."

"“Whether the vaccinee will maintain efficacy against the new variants springing up in India is not yet clear but it is . . . likely that they will have at least some efficacy,” said Peter English, a retired consultant in communicable disease control based in the UK.

"As only about 10 per cent of India’s population has been vaccinated, “the variants are not yet under strong pressure from vaccine immunity so there is no great pressure for vaccine escape mutants to arise”, he added."

"There has been a lot of focus on the B. 1.617 variant,” said Michael Head, senior research fellow in global health at Southampton University in the UK. “But it’s the mixing of susceptible populations that ultimately drives the transmission of respiratory infectious diseases.”