A new, little-understood coronavirus variant has arrived in Dallas

A new, poorly understood variant of the coronavirus has arrived in North Texas. Doctors at UT Southwestern Medical Center have found five cases of the so-called lambda variant in patient samples taken at the center between early June and July 18.

“This represents what happens when virus replication continues and spreads around the world,” said Dr. Jeffrey SoRelle, pathologist at UT Southwestern’s genome sequencing laboratory, which has analyzed more than 1,000 samples since early 2021.

Little is known about how contagious the lambda variant is, or how severe the disease is that it can cause. Two recent studies, none of which were peer-reviewed, found it to be more contagious than older versions of the coronavirus and more resistant to antibodies generated by vaccination.

But SoRelle and other experts say the vaccines available in the US are still effective against it.

According to the World Health Organization, lambda was first identified in Peru last December. It now accounts for the majority of cases there.

Since last year, lambda has spread rapidly to parts of South America, including Chile and Ecuador. The World Health Organization called it an “interesting variant” in June, meaning that it caused “significant community transmissions or multiple COVID-19 clusters in multiple countries”.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has not yet followed this example with its own name. In the United States, lambda made up just 0.1% of new cases in the past four weeks, according to a database available for scientists tracking coronavirus variants.

SoRelle said he was less concerned about Lambda than about the Delta variant, which now accounts for 95% of new COVID cases in the Dallas area. By some estimates, Delta is more than twice as contagious as older versions of the coronavirus. The lambda variant, however, remains at a very low transmission rate, said SoRelle.

And studies show that vaccines remain effective against both them and the Delta variant. The two most recent studies, one by researchers from New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine and another by researchers in Japan, showed that lambda is about two or three times more resistant to vaccine-generated antibodies than older strains of the virus, SoRelle said.

However, this difference is not enough to undermine the protection of vaccines.

“It’s statistically significant but not clinically significant,” he said. Other variants of concern, including Beta, which was first identified in South Africa and Gamma, which was first identified in Brazil, are seven to 30 times more resistant to vaccines.

“We find that antibodies generated by vaccination neutralize the lambda variant well,” Nathaniel Landau, a microbiologist at New York University, said in an email. His team tested antibodies generated against the virus by the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines.

“That means the vaccines offer excellent protection against this new variant,” he said. “These findings are another reason to get vaccinated.”

Indeed, there is some evidence that lambda is plateauing rather than increasing in prevalence on the world stage – possibly surpassed by Delta. A coronavirus database appears to show it is becoming rarer in Peru, although recent information is incomplete, scientists said.

The same is true locally.

“A handful of lambda cases have been discovered in Texas for quite some time – with no evidence that they have increased significantly,” said Emma Hodcroft, an epidemiologist at the University of Bern in Switzerland who tracks coronavirus variants around the world.

“It would be interesting to know if there is any travel history information for those who tested positive for lambda,” she said. “I suspect that some of them are imported from South America and that local distribution may be limited.”

The take-home message from UT Southwestern’s findings, SoRelle said, is that the coronavirus will continue to change and evolve as long as it is transmitted from person to person. “If we don’t want to hear about all these different varieties,” he said, “the best way to avoid it is vaccination.”

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