Latest updates: UK officials face urgent calls for tougher border measures as the search continues for one of six people infected with Brazilian variant

On its website South Gloucestershire council has given details of where surge testing is taking place in response to the discovery of two cases of the P1 Brazil variant in the borough. Here are the postcode sectors where people are being asked to get tested:

BS32 0
BS32 8
BS32 9
BS34 5
BS34 6

Prof Danny Altmann, a professor of immunology at Imperial College London, told Times Radio this morning that people should be “somewhat worried” about the discovery of the Brazilian variant P1 in the UK. Asked how worried people should be, he replied:

Somewhat worried but not total panic, perhaps.

It’s somewhat more worrying than the UK variant, the Kent variant, that we’re used to talking about, because it covers the double whammy, we think, of being more transmissible and somewhat better at evading neutralising antibodies.

It was expected that there would be quite a high level of protection there because analysis of antibodies in blood bank samples showed [Manaus] had one of the highest levels of immunity in the world coming into the second wave, perhaps more than 70%, and yet they’re seeing this enormous wave of reinfections.

So, if you put two and two together their assumption is that’s because the new variant is breaking through those antibodies. But if that hadn’t really been proven yet, it looks likely.

It is possible that the P1 variant will show similar patterns of antigenic escape [ie resistance to immunity] to vaccine-acquired immunity as the B1351 variant [the so-called South African varian], due to similar genomic profiles, in particular the presence of E484K. However, there remains no direct evidence for antigenic escape from vaccine-acquired immunity in the P1 variant.

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