[ad_1]
The SARS-Cov-2 virus variant detected in the UK is “growing exponentially” in Portugal, said a researcher at the National Institute of Health Ricardo Jorge, who estimates that the weekly growth rate reaches 90%.
“We also estimate that in three weeks around 65% of all covid-19 cases in Portugal are caused by the UK variant,” João Paulo Gomes said in a joint hearing with other public health experts at the Commission. Eventual for follow-up. the implementation of measures to respond to the pandemic and the process of economic and social recovery in parliament.
Asked about the degree of transmissibility of this variant, the coordinator of the study on genetic diversity of SARS-CoV-2 in Portugal stated that it is approximately 50% more transmissible.
If the UK variant had “a modest weight” in December, at the moment it has “a very sensitive weight in the number of covid-19 cases in Portugal,” he said, considering that it “works as a very considerable counterweight to the measures. of confinement “”.
At the hearing, João Paulo Gomes told how the variant entered the country: “International alerts began to appear in mid-December.”
“Although it was initially reported in late summer in the south-east of the UK, when it started to gain prevalence in the UK, reports of its presence and spread in other countries began and Portugal was no exception,” he reported.
INSA began investigating and the first cases began to appear in December.
“These cases were naturally associated with the massive return of our emigrants to work in the UK during the month of December and also with many British tourists who came to Portugal to spend their holidays during the month of December,” he said.
Therefore, there were “huge presentations” during the month of December, he said, recalling that in the first half of December travelers from the United Kingdom were not required to present a negative test, nor were they required to be tested at Portuguese airports.
“That has changed and since January of the same year they have all been tested. However, there were many introductions and this caused the UK variant to spread very quickly,” he stressed.
To date, it is estimated that between 35% and 40% of the total cases of covid-19 in Portugal are already caused by this variant.
Regarding the evolution of its prevalence, if at the beginning of December the estimates indicated that it would be a minimum percentage of 1%, at this moment “it is growing exponentially”.
As for why there are more cases in Lisbon and the Tagus Valley, he said because it is perhaps the region for which there is “the most robust and consistent data.”
Also questioned about the variant in Brazil, the INSA researcher said that it has not yet been detected in Portugal, but pointed out that he cannot guarantee this fact with certainty.
“I can say, however, that we are doing a monthly screening in collaboration with a large consortium of laboratories spread throughout the country to make hundreds of samples with geographic representation,” he added.
João Paulo Gomes affirmed that now the focus is on suspicious cases with a history of travel in the field of collaboration and the information they receive from public health authorities.
Cases of people who arrived infected from Brazil or who had contact with positive cases with relevant travel history are treated, in this case Brazil, with the corresponding samples sent to INSA to be subjected to advanced genetic characterization analysis by sequencing.
Regarding the South African variant, he said only one case has been identified so far, but health officials have been taking some suspected cases to the lab.
“Now we have a genetic characterization session underway with some of these cases and, therefore, in a few days there may or may not be news”, concluded João Paulo Gomes.
The covid-19 pandemic caused at least 2,191,865 deaths as a result of more than 101 million cases of infection worldwide, according to a report by the French agency AFP.
In Portugal, 11,886 people died out of 698,583 confirmed cases of infection, according to the most recent bulletin from the Directorate General of Health.
The disease is transmitted by a new coronavirus detected in late December 2019 in Wuhan, a city in central China.
[ad_2]
