Indian ‘double mutant’ strain named B.1.617

First variant to have 2 mutations that enable it to evade antibodies and increase inffectivity

The ‘double mutant’ virus that scientists had flagged last month as having a bearing on the spread of the pandemic in India, has a formal scientific classification: B.1.617. Other than a place on the coronavirus’s evolutionary history, it also brings focus on the role the variant may be playing in the pandemic, which is now seeing nearly 100,000 fresh infections daily and a conflict between the Centre and some States on the availability of vaccines. The variant is common in India — how much in every state though is unclear — and has a couple of defining mutations, E484Q and L425R, that enable them to become more infectious as well as evade antibodies. Though these mutations have individually been found in several other coronavirus variants, the presence of both these mutations together have been first found in some coronavirus genomes from India.