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The English variant of the COVID-19 he is among us. She is hinted at in a family of Loreto made up of three people who last Friday decided to undergo a molecular smear because they are fighting a bad cold. Four days later, the verdict came: one of the family members tested positive for Covid. Not the one we know and are fighting for, but his “son”, the variant of the S gene that in the hierarchy of terror has supplanted Sars-Cov-2 and is so terrifying that half the world has isolated Great Britain, with a block of flights and more than 200 billion burned by the European stock exchanges.
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The discovery
Across the Canal, the new strain is spreading at an exponential rate. In Italy, for now, only two cases have been registered. One in Rome, a 42-year-old working in London, the other in the province of Ancona. The English variant was discovered yesterday in the Virology laboratory of the Torrette regional hospital, directed by Professor Stefano Menzo. “We conducted a survey of the samples collected in the last week and we have identified not the entire viral genome, but a partial sequence,” explains the specialist. Of the small portion we have the well-founded suspicion that it is the English variant, although to isolate virus it will take a few more days.
But what is it that scares this new strain so much? “There are no scientific publications on the matter – explains Menzo – but English colleagues affirm that it has a greater infectious potential than the Covid that we know, so it passes more quickly from one person to another. From a study published on the website of the European Agency for the Transmission of Diseases, it appears that it has spread in England with extreme speed, as did the Spanish variant in Italy in the second wave, starting with young people in the last school age and then penetrating the rest. of the population “.
English variant, in Rome holes in the controls of Ciampino and Fiumicino. Experts: “There is a risk of false negatives”
Features
Enough to raise the level of the guard. “We know with certainty that until November this variant never circulated in the Marches, but probably now it has arrived”, explains Menzo. It is a strain that has “about twenty multiform mutations in a genome of about 30,000 nucleotides. The variations, therefore, are few and small, but they exist and seem sufficient to accelerate the transmission of the virus, even if it does not have a particular clinical aggression. In fact, the first patient from the Marche region does not present any particular symptoms, apart from the cold: he is now isolated with his two relatives, but did not need hospitalization. They certainly haven’t been to England recently, so there would be no connection to the British country.: the Asur has launched an epidemiological investigation to map the contagion. The enigma now concerns the Pfizer-Biontech vaccine that will be distributed in Italy from Sunday: Ema (the European Medicines Agency) claims that it is also effective against the English virus. Opinion shared by Professor Menzo: “The variant must not possess particular properties to escape the response evoked by the vaccine,” he explains, “but the companies that produced it are expanding a rapid trial to verify it.”
Last update: 11:51
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