Speaker
Description
The B.1.351/Beta VOC was first identified in South Africa in October 2020. Within the United Kingdom (UK), the first two cases of Beta were detected on 10 December 2020. Thereafter, the increase in the number of cases of Beta within the country raised alarms of its rapid growth which led to the UK government closing its international borders to prevent further introductions. Additionally, in February 2021, the government introduced enhanced surge testing to find cases of Beta in regions where it had previously been spreading. However, unlike other countries, Beta failed to seed a major wave of infection within the UK. Here, we studied the distribution of Beta within the UK and examined whether the variant was genuinely growing throughout the country or whether the apparent pattern was observed due to biased sampling. We used data from COVID-19 Genomics consortium (COG-UK) to assess relative proportions and relative growth rate advantage of Beta using a Gaussian method. We observed significant growth rate advantage for Beta among COG-UK samples between March to mid-April 2021. We also detected a growth rate advantage for samples obtained from both surge testing and non-surge testing areas. This indicated the presence of a significant country-wide growth rate advantage which was unaffected by any sampling biases brought about by surge testing. Further, phylogenetic analysis revealed the presence of multiple introductions and subsequent onward transmission. Thus, our study gives an overview of the widespread distribution of Beta within the UK and provides evidence for the presence of a genuine country-wide outbreak of Beta. This rapid identification of cases could never have been achieved by random sampling alone. The findings derived from the study can help when implementing targeted surveillance strategies for controlling new and emerging outbreaks caused by different pathogens including Disease X.
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