VUI-202012/01

 Another year, another COVID name.  This one doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue and I think that in Australia most people would tend to refer to it as the new UK COVID strain.  The name decodes easily, however. VUI stands for Variant Under Investigation.  2020 is the year and 12 is the month (December) in which it appeared in the UK. /01 indicates that it is the first such variant.  This name was swiftly altered to be VOC-202012/01, that is Variant Of Concern rather than Variant Under Investigation.  

Other names such as lineage B117, and 20I/501Y.V1 are more precise references to the significant changes in the genome. The South African strain of SARS-COV-2 is referred to as the B1351 variant, identifying a slightly different point in the genome that has changed.

There are 17 differences between this variant and the original coronavirus, the most significant being a change to the spike protein that allows the virus to bind to human cells, which seems to make it even more infectious than the original virus. At the moment it seems unlikely that the vaccines under development will be affected in any way.