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The French Ministry of Health announced this Thursday that it detected the first case in the country of a person infected with the variant of the covid-19 virus first identified in South Africa.
According to the Ministry of Health, this Wednesday the presence of the virus variant was confirmed in a man who was returning from a stay in South Africa and residing in eastern France, near the border with Switzerland.
The man, who developed symptoms associated with the disease, was examined in Switzerland and, with the positive test, an analysis of the virus sequence was performed, which confirmed the 501.V2 variant, first identified in South Africa and which is responsible for most of the new cases in this African country, the most affected by the pandemic on the continent.
The person in question, who is now cured, “immediately went into isolation at home as soon as symptoms appeared and no risky contacts were identified,” the French Health Ministry said in a statement cited by AFP.
A first case of the variant identified in the United Kingdom this month was confirmed in France on December 25, in Tours, in the center of the country, in a Frenchman who had arrived from London a few days earlier.
The health authorities guarantee that they are “mobilized to identify each infected patient as soon as possible to isolate him, isolate his contacts and test them, and thus prevent the spread of variants of SRA-CoV-2 in the national territory.”
The European Center for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) warned this week of the “high” risk that these variants put pressure on health systems and are a major cause of death due to their greater contagion.
For each person returning from the UK or South Africa who tested positive for Covid-19, samples should be sequenced to confirm the possible presence of a variant of the virus, according to experts.
France registered 26,467 new cases of covid-19 in the last 24 hours, thus totaling 2,600,498 cases since the beginning of the pandemic, according to French authorities in the most recent update.
In the last 24 hours, 304 people died from the new coronavirus, raising the total number of deaths in the country to 64,381 since the start of the pandemic.
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