A medical research group said it discovered a genetic variation of the novel coronavirus that infects human cells more readily than the one that emerged in China.
The Philippine Genome Center said that last July, it found the G614 variant "in a small sample of positive cases" in Quezon City.
"Although this information confirms the presence of G614 in the Philippines, we note that all the samples tested were from Quezon City and may not represent the mutational landscape for the whole country," it said in a bulletin released Aug. 13
Foreign researchers earlier said the new variant has become the dominant strain worldwide. It said that the variant makes a change in the "spike" protein that protrudes from the surface of the virus, which it uses to invade and infect human cells.
"I think the data is showing that there is a single mutation that actually makes the virus be able to replicate better, and maybe have high viral loads," Anthony Fauci, the United States' top infectious disease specialist, who wasn't involved in the research, commented to Journal of the American Medical Association.
Los Alamos National Laboratory researchers in New Mexico and Duke University in North Carolina had partnered with the University of Sheffield's COVID-19 Genomics UK research group to analyze genome samples published on GISAID, an international resource for sharing genome sequences.
They analyzed data from 999 British patients hospitalized with the virus and observed that those with the variant had more viral particles in them, but without this changing the severity of their disease.
They said that based on laboratory experiments, the variant is 3 to 6 times more capable of infecting human cells.
"It seems likely that it's a fitter virus," said Erica Ollmann Saphire, who conducted the experiments at La Jolla Institute for Immunology.
Still, there is no evidence that the variant is deadlier than its earlier iteration, according to Dr. Edsel Salvaña, a clinical associate professor at the Philippine General Hospital.
"Kailangan pa nating mas lalong paigtingin iyong ating mga preventive measures," said Salvaña, who is also director of University of the Philippines Manila's Institute of Molecular Biology.
On Sunday, the Health department confirmed 161, 253 cases of COVID-19, 46,002 of which were still active.