MONTREAL -- Quebec could see amounts of new daily cases of COVID-19 that dwarf previous records due to the spread of highly-contagious variants of the virus, experts warn.
Among the most contagious variant is one that originated in the United Kingdom, which spreads considerably faster than the original Covid-19 strain that has already infected millions over the past year.
Numerous cases of the U.K. variant have already been identified in Quebec, brought to the province by people who travelled internationally .
With at least 135 cases identified in the province as of Wednesday, experts said it could quickly become the dominant strain by March, and infect thousands every day within a few weeks, just as the number of new cases has dropped to below 1000 in recent days
“We have a case in Laval, many cases in Montreal, we announced a few cases in Abitibi being explored to see how many cases were linked to these first cases”, says Jocelyne Sauve, from the National Institute of Public Health (INSPQ).
As a result of this new variant, testing methods are being fine-tuned and more precise data will be available by the end of this month. Scientists from the INSPQ announced that the variant's spread will depend on whether or not Quebecers continue to follow social distancing and sanitary rules. That is cause for concern, because the Legault government announced yesterday that rules for spring break have been slightly loosened.
Sauvé said the danger is that the new variant spreads much faster than the regular one.
“We would lose totally the control of a new variant, then it starts spreading very widely in the community” she said.
The variant not only spreads faster, but early observations suggest it could be more dangerous, leading to more medical complications. The current vaccination campaign probably wouldn’t be advanced enough to stop the spread, warned Marc Brisson, who heads the Laval University research group mapping out infectious diseases.
“Given the number of people vaccinated, we don't take into account any herd effect given that the coverage by the time we reach April would be too low to have herd immunity through vaccination”, he said.
On the plus side , the INSPQ experts said the U.K. variant isn't likely to result in an increase in hospitalizations, because health-care professionals and vulnerable seniors have already received their first dose of a vaccine.
