The Danish government has ordered the culling of at least 15 million mink and put 6 North Jutland municipalities in hard lock down to prevent the spread of a mutated strain of COVID19 that might render vaccines ineffective.
The action comes after a new strain of the virus has been found in mink, and in a few cases in humans too. The new strain called “cluster 5” is apparently less reactive to antibodies against the original virus.
This has created fears that the new strain will make any vaccine ineffective already before it has been thoroughly tested and thus hamper the development of vaccines and start the pandemic all over again.
That mink have proved very receptible to the virus causing COVID19 has been known for a while, and also that people working with them have been exposed to infections from them. This problem is exacerbated by the concentration of the animals in small cages on mink farms.
So Denmark and other countries have been culling mink from infected farms for a while, including non-infected farms in a 5 mile radius around infected farms.
The theory is now that the infection via a different host than humans have induced different mutations in the virus in its attempt to adapt to the host. And one of these mutations has made the virus less reactive to antibodies against the original virus.
The new strain is not believed to be more virulent or infectious than the current ones, but it has potentially grave concequences both for the immunity in already infected humans and for vaccine development.
If there was already a vaccine that had been proved to be working, this would be less of a problem. If you know the basic method is effective, you can pretty easily develop a vaccine that targets the new strain too, and then give people a cocktail of the two. This is done with flu vaccines constantly.
But with vaccines still in development, two different strains of which a vaccine is only effective against one can seriously blur the testing results and thus the development of the vaccine.
So far the new strain has been found in 12 humans, but testing for it has been sporadic, so there’s probably more.
This has led to a very sharp reaction from the Danish authorities hoping to quell the new outbreak before it becomes widely spread.
First is the culling of the country’s total fur industry. This is no small potato. Denmark is the world’s largest exporter of mink fur of a value of about a billion dollars a year. Copenhagen is also the hub of the global fur trade. The industry might never come back and at the very least it will have to start from scratch as all animals will be culled, including the breeding stock that has been carefully refined for decades. As a minimum another large chunk of reparations has to be forked out to farmers and others in the industry.
Second, six municipalities where 11 of the 12 human cases have appeared have been placed in hard lock down. So far all non essential workers are asked to stay home and travel in and out of the municipalities is strongly discouraged. All restaurants, cinemas, theatres, indoor sport facilities, libraries, adult education, public transport in and out of the municipalities and schools from 5th grade and up is to close. And more restrictions are coming the government says, including in more localities if needed.
To add perspective Denmark has had reasonable control over the pandemic. There’s been a second wave, but incremental steps (most visibly closing night life after 10 PM and mask mandates) combined with extensive testing have kept the growth manageable and the rate of positive tests under 2 percent. So the local measures are much stricter than what the rest of the country is under.
The minister of health has announced that all postive COVID19 tests will be genetically tested for the new strain, though it’s not clear how far back in time this will go. At present only 17 percent is genetically tested.
The problem is that the genetical test is a slow process that takes weeks. Far too slow to do contact tracing to stem an outbreak. But it will track if there’s a larger geographical spread.
A huge warning flashing red is the 12th case — an elderly man in a nursing home in Sealand in the other end of the country and not far from the main population centre of Copenhagen (and in an area where mink farms are not common). So far the authorities have not taken any outward action on this and there’s no word on how he might have gotten the infection.
So far it’s not clear how serious this is, neither in terms of consequences for vaccine development and immunity in previously infected patients nor in terms of how widespread the new strain is or wheather it can actually be contained — just that it’s potetially very serious.