COVID-19: New variants of coronavirus may ’emerge from a blue sky’, warns Professor Chris Whitty | UK News

New variants of the coronavirus may “emerge from a blue sky,” warned Professor Chris Whitty.

England’s chief medical officer issued the warning at a press conference in Downing Street, following a rise in cases of a worrying variant first found in India.

Professor Whitty also mentioned the strain which was first identified in Kent.

He was talking next door Boris Johnson as the Prime Minister announced the latest round of coronavirus restrictions to be relieved.

Data presented at the meeting showed that 520 cases of COVID-19[female[feminine a variant first detected in India was found in the UK until Wednesday 5 May.

This is an increase of 318 cases from the previous week.

India suffered one of the worst outbreaks of the pandemic, with hospitals running out of oxygen and makeshift funeral pyres set up to burn the bodies of the victims.

According to Johns Hopkins University, the country has recorded 22,662,575 cases of the virus and 246,116 deaths.

Some 168,304,868 doses of vaccine were administered, with 34,450,192 people fully inoculated, equivalent to 2.52% of the population.

Professor Whitty said: “What we know with all the variants is that things can come out of a blue sky – you wouldn’t expect it and then something happens – it happened with the B.1.1.7 (the variant first identified in Kent) this also happened to India with this variant.

“At this point, we believe this is a highly transmissible variant, at least as transmissible as the B.1.1.7 variant – it may be more transmissible, but we’ll have to see.”

He added: “Most of the (variants) are currently relatively stable and are not increasing at a high rate, which is slightly concerning in terms of …