Thread by @DrEricDing

📍New variant alert—I’m quietly monitoring several odd variants signals that have emerged this week. For now, I’ll just share this— #B11529 has 32 new mutations in the #SARSCoV2 spike protein alone— “an extremely high number” & “could be a real concern”.🧵
theguardian.com/world/2021/nov…

2) The variant was first spotted in Botswana, where three cases have now been sequenced. Six more have been confirmed in South Africa, and one in Hong Kong in a traveller returning from South Africa. github.com/cov-lineages/p…

3) Dr Tom Peacock, a virologist at Imperial College London, posted details of the new variant on a genome-sharing website, noting that the “incredibly high amount of spike mutations suggest this could be of real concern”

https://twitter.com/peacockflu/status/1463176827137101827

4) @PeacockFlu seem worried— he says the new #B11529 variant from Botswana has an “really awful Spike mutation profile”.

5) The first cases of the variant were collected in Botswana on 11 November, and the earliest in South Africa was recorded three days later.

6) The case found in Hong Kong was a 36-year-old man who had a negative PCR test before flying from Hong Kong to South Africa, where he stayed from 22 October to 11 November. He tested negative on his return to Hong Kong, but tested positive on 13 November while in quarantine. 👀

7) Notably, it’s the first time that a variant has *2* furin cleavage site mutations. “variant contains not one, but two furin cleavage site mutations - P681H & N679K- this is the first time @PeacockFlu seen 2 of these mutations in a single variant.”

📌Furin site spells trouble.

8) Side note… couple months ago, I warned about a new #C12 variant that newly emerged in South Africa. Some said it was going nowhere, despite it achieving 2x as many mutations from expected average. Well, I have an update on C12 (next post #9 below)…

https://twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1432200392776028162

9) …well bad news, it seems #C12 variant has now suddenly spiked and achieved 30% of all sequences #SARSCoV2 variants in South Africa. 30% doesn’t seem to be a fluke. And this excludes recently unstable numbers. C12 is real.
outbreak.info/situation-repo…

10) Back to the first #B11529 Botswana variant with 32 mutations… @ravgup33_ravi says this about the new variant: “This one is worrying and I’ve not said that since delta… the mutations in this virus likely result in high level escape from neutralising antibodies” 👀 #COVID19

11) I’ll post more updates later… but back to C12… let’s look at what’s going on in South Africa… for several weeks, #C12 has now become fiercely winning against even the unstoppable #DeltaVariant!! Look at how #C12 is displacing Delta. It’s all over the data for weeks now. 👀

12) Another side note about the #DeltaVariant—one of its most dangerous mutations was in the furin cleavage site P681H.

Guess which variant also has another nasty mutation at the same 681 amino acid spot?➡️ The new Botswana #B11529 variant.
nature.com/articles/d4158…

13) New data just in on #B11529 from @MoshabelaMosa — “becoming dominant” and “displacing Delta” is not language we want to see. See 🧵 below.

https://twitter.com/drericding/status/1463925612402429952

14) the “dominant” prevalence comes from Kwazulu-Natal region — where the blue dots represent almost all the new sequences discovered. The blue dots 🔵 are the new worrisome #B11529. 👀

15) bad update… here is what we just discovered happened with #B11529 in quarantine note in Hong Kong…

https://twitter.com/drericding/status/1463998740340121601