Monday, February 08, 2021
Before the Corona summit
Merkel suspects virus mutations in 20 percent
Chancellor Merkel assumes that the proportion of virus mutations among the corona samples is already 20 percent. According to participants in the CDU presidium, she expressed herself accordingly.
According to the latest data from the Robert Koch Institute, the virus mutation B.1.1.7, which first appeared in Great Britain, accounts for 5.8 percent of positive corona samples in Germany, including the mutations from South Africa and Brazil, the figure is 6.9 Percent. However, these numbers are not entirely new: They come from a report last Friday and refer to the last week of January.
Before the federal-state meeting on Wednesday there should be more current data. According to information from ntv and RTL, Chancellor Angela Merkel assumes that the numbers are now significantly higher. In the CDU presidium meeting on Monday, she said, according to participants: "I suspect that 20 percent of all corona infections are currently due to the mutations."
In an interview with ntv and RTL last week, Merkel said that she could not yet say what would be decided on Wednesday at the federal-state summit. She wants to wait for the further development and see how the virus mutation has already penetrated.
Virus mutations likely to increase
One of her advisors also sounds the alarm and fears that the incidence values will rise dramatically. The bioinformatics scientist Rolf Apweiler, director of the European Bioinformatics Institute in Cambridge, UK, issued an urgent warning: If you extrapolate the speed of spread, we could be at an incidence of "at least 400" at the end of March – despite the current lockdown measures.
Apweiler refers to the mentioned data from the Robert Koch Institute: This shows that at the end of 2020, less than one percent of positive samples in Germany had the British, South African or Brazilian mutations. Three weeks later, the value of all these mutations was 6.9 percent. Within that short period of time, the number of cases with coronavirus mutations had increased from less than 1200 to about 6600 – an increase of about 77 percent per week.
In a calculation by the bioinformatics specialist, which is available to RTL and ntv, Apweiler assumes that the current measures are not sufficient to stop the spread of the various variants. The mutations could be the dominant variant in just two weeks. With the current lockdown measures and their implementation, the scientist is assuming an increase in the incidence of 30 to 70 percent per week. Thus, the incidence value at the end of March would be around 400.
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