Warnings as UK strain detected across the country

Health authorities are alarmed at the arrival in Australia of the highly infectious UK super COVID-19 strain that has shut down Britain.

The UK coronavirus variant is believed to be up to 70 per cent more infectious, and has prompted national lockdowns in England and Scotland, which are unlikely to lifted until at least mid-February.

Health authorities are alarmed at the arrival in Australia of the highly infectious UK super COVID-19 strain that has shut down Britain, with warnings that current quarantine procedures may not be strong enough to contain the threat.

The new super strain has been detected in at least two returned travellers in Sydney, three in Perth, four in Victoria and another in South Australia.

The UK variant is believed to be up to 70 per cent more infectious, and has prompted a national lockdown in England and Scotland unlikely to be lifted until at least mid-February.

The new variant also has the potential to affect children badly because it finds it easier to get into children’s systems than previous versions.

Australian Medical Association president Omar Khorshid told The Australian he was concerned that the UK virus or another super strain could enter Australia and escape hotel quarantine.

“We’ve already seen our quarantine systems fail significantly with the virus escaping from quarantine in Victoria, NSW and South Australia; we’ve also seen breaches of quarantine in other places like WA although with no transmission occurring,” Dr Khorshid said.

“But with this highly transmissible variant of COVID, either the UK or South African one, there’s going to be more potential for that spread to occur from an infected traveller to a quarantine worker.”

Dr Khorshid was critical of the practices that led to transmissions occurring in NSW while returned travellers were being transported.

“I don’t know what PPE they were wearing but my guess is that they were not wearing appropriate respirator type masks or N95 masks. And I think we need to accept that with this more transmissible variant, there is going to be more need to look at making sure that the PPE is of adequate quality to protect against airborne transmission of the virus.”

Dr Khorshid backed moves to test all returning travellers before they left the country of origin. “It’s not going to be foolproof because obviously people could test negative and still have the virus, but at least you would reduce the chances of somebody who’s already carrying one of these highly transmissible variants getting on an aeroplane,” he said.

Although the Berala cluster in Sydney’s west does not involve the UK variant, the outbreak began when a quarantine transport worker visited the Berala BWS liquor store while unknowingly infected, the fourth breach of Sydney’s international arrival and hotel quarantine system in a month.

While NSW Chief Health Officer Kerry Chant was confident the state’s procedures could contain the new strain, Victoria’s Police Minister, Lisa Neville, said it was possible British travellers could be banned from entering Victoria. Victoria will push for a nationwide agreement to assess the risk of the strain to Australia.

Jeremy Nicholson, from Murdoch University’s Australian National Phenome Centre, said the UK variant’s arrival in Perth was alarming because it found it easier to get into children’s systems than previous versions.

Professor Nicholson said the new strain has 17 mutations, “with eight in the spike protein that is the key to the virus penetrating the cell via receptor binding”.

“This is like having a better key to a lock which opens the cell more easily to the virus,” he said. “The easier it is to get in, the more infectious it is and therefore the fewer virus particles in the air needed. This variant finds it easier to get into children than previous versions.”

He said children were always able to catch COVID-19 and spread it. “But they have tended to have only mild respiratory symptoms. With the new variant they get much worse respiratory symptoms because the virus can get into the lung more easily.”

More rarely, children have also suffered from multi-system inflammatory syndrome, which can lead to serious and life-threatening organ failure.

“We do not know if the new variant will cause that as well, but the threat posed is to a much larger section of society should this strain become dominant.” Any outbreak could have serious implications for the way schools and universities respond to outbreaks, Professor Nicholson said.

West Australian Premier Mark McGowan said on Tuesday that genome sequencing confirmed the UK strain in three international arrivals to Perth in hotel quarantine. “It just goes to show that we’re not out of the woods with COVID,” he said.