Growing concern over Brazil coronavirus variant

This Brazilian variant is not going to be the last mutation we hear about.

Expect announcements of new variants to become common place as enough time passes to allow mutations to emerge, spread and take hold in the population, reports BBC.

For now there's no evidence the virus is becoming more deadly.

But as long as it doesn’t become less deadly, more people catching it still means that, left unchecked, more will potentially become ill or die.

Worryingly, the Brazil and South African variants do appear to have changes which let it evade some of our natural immune response.

There's no evidence yet that it can evade the vaccine - bearing in mind it has probably been in circulation since July - but this is something that scientists the world over will be monitoring very closely.

And while mutations are mainly being picked up in areas that do lots of sequencing of the virus, it’s almost certain others are circulating unseen around the globe.