Prince William and Kate release photo of daughter Charlotte to mark ninth birthday
Prince William and his wife Kate released a picture of their daughter Charlotte to mark the princess's ninth birthday on Thursday.
A new Delta subvariant COVID-19 strain has been designated a "Variant Under Investigation" by the U.K., saying early evidence suggests it may be more transmissible compared to Delta.
The strain does not appear to result in more severe disease or render vaccines less effective, the U.K. Health Security Agency (UKHSA) said in an announcement published Friday. It was also given the official name of "VUI-21OCT-01."
The subvariant, which had previously been dubbed "Delta Plus" or "AY.4.2," was first detected in England back in July. Data from the UKHSA shows an estimated 6 per cent of recent COVID-19 cases in the U.K., where case numbers have been surging, are of this Delta subvariant.
"Viruses mutate often and at random, and it is not unexpected that new variants will continue to arise as the pandemic goes on, particularly while the case rate remains high," UKHSA chief executive Dr. Jenny Harries said. "It should serve as objective evidence that this pandemic is not over."
More investigation is needed to confirm if the strain, which has also been detected in Canada and the U.S., is indeed more contagious than the Delta variant, the UKHSA says.
"As AY.4.2 is still at fairly low frequency, a 10 per cent increase in its transmissibility could have caused only a small number of additional cases," Francois Balloux, director of the genetics institute at University College London, told the Science Media Centre on Tuesday. "As such it hasn't been driving the recent increase in case numbers in the U.K."
If the subvariant is in fact more transmissible, Balloux said the difference would not be the same as the one brought on by the Delta variant, which was far more contagious than any strain in circulation at the time.
"We are dealing with a potential small increase in transmissibility that would not have a comparable impact on the pandemic," he said.
A small number of cases of the new strain have popped up in Canada, but it's unclear if it's more contagious than the Delta variant, according to Dr. Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization at the University of Saskatchewan.
Dr. Rasmussen said the U.K.'s robust genomic surveillance, which sequences about 10 per cent of the positive COVID-19 cases they have, may be a reason why they have detected more cases.
"In many places, we still don't have the surveillance capacity to find these variants if they emerge," she told CTV News Channel on Wednesday. "They also might not be emerging. We haven't really seen anything that indicates that this is becoming prevalent in Canada."
Dr. Rasmussen also believes it's likely the vaccines currently deployed in Canada will be effective against the subvariant.
"The vaccines that we currently have are quite effective against original recipe Delta," she said. "Of course, we should wait and see, we should take a look at it, but there's really nothing that stands out to me as a concern as far as vaccine effectiveness against this particular sublineage."
Prince William and his wife Kate released a picture of their daughter Charlotte to mark the princess's ninth birthday on Thursday.
The trusted traveller program between Canada and the United States is extremely popular and almost two million Canadians have a Nexus card.
Scientists studying a Neanderthal woman's remains have painstakingly pieced together her skull from 200 bone fragments to understand what she may have looked like.
Inspections are underway at more than one Loblaws location in Ottawa after complaints were filed about tall Plexiglas barriers.
The makers of Ozempic say their weight-loss drug Wegovy will be available to patients in Canada starting Monday.
Archeologists have unearthed the skeletons of five people, missing their hands and feet, at a former Nazi military base in Poland.
A Canadian restaurant lowered its prices this week, and though news of price tags dropping rather than climbing sounds unusual, the business strategy in this case is not, according to experts in the field.
In an effort to balance the profitability of Mother's Day with the pain it causes some people, some brands are offering customers the choice to opt out of Mother's Day email advertising.
Just days before the seventh anniversary of the day Jack Letts was thrown in prison with thousands of suspected ISIS fighters, his mother, Sally Lane, delivered a small stack of envelopes to the headquarters of Global Affairs Canada in Ottawa.
A group of SaskPower workers recently received special recognition at the legislature – for their efforts in repairing one of Saskatchewan's largest power plants after it was knocked offline for months following a serious flood last summer.
A police officer on Montreal's South Shore anonymously donated a kidney that wound up drastically changing the life of a schoolteacher living on dialysis.
Since 1932, Montreal's Henri Henri has been filled to the brim with every possible kind of hat, from newsboy caps to feathered fedoras.
Police in Oak Bay, B.C., had to close a stretch of road Sunday to help an elephant seal named Emerson get safely back into the water.
Out of more than 9,000 entries from over 2,000 breweries in 50 countries, a handful of B.C. brews landed on the podium at the World Beer Cup this week.
Raneem, 10, lives with a neurological condition and liver disease and needs Cholbam, a medication, for a longer and healthier life.
The lawyer for a residential school survivor leading a proposed class-action defamation lawsuit against the Catholic Church over residential schools says the court action is a last resort.
Mounties in Nanaimo, B.C., say two late-night revellers are lucky their allegedly drunken antics weren't reported to police after security cameras captured the men trying to steal a heavy sign from a downtown business.
A property tax bill is perplexing a small townhouse community in Fergus, Ont.