Positive for Covid-19, yes, but for what?
To the “traditional” virus?
To his British clone?
To its South African or Brazilian variants?
"They are not contagious in the same way, we necessarily want to know
ours
to know what sauce we are going to be eaten", summarizes Isabelle, a forty-something Parisian, the only one of her family to be (for the moment) infected. .
But will she know?
“For three to four days, we have sent a double report to our patients.
The first, about twelve hours after the test, to give them their Covid status.
If it is positive, they will know 48 hours later if it is the result of a mutation, ”explains the biologist Arnaud Chenebit, co-director of a private laboratory in Saint-Denis (Seine-Saint-Denis).
In the meantime, the sample from the nostrils will have been sent to another platform to be "double checked", he said.
For ten days, specific PCR kits - three have been approved for the moment - have in fact made it possible to distinguish the variants in circulation and to suspect their presence in the sample.
A double analysis which concerns several thousand of the 20,000 new infected daily in France.
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But beware, if some receive their famous report, it is far from generalized.
And for good reason, we are at the very beginning.
"These kits are very recent, not all laboratories have screening yet", decrypts Lionel Barrand, the president of the union of young medical biologists.
“But with the strengthening of contact-tracing for these cases, the Health Insurance and the regional health agencies are primarily calling for positive variants.
It's a way for people tested to know, ”he continues.
The authorities want to put “the package” on this public, insisting on the isolation and the need to inform as quickly as possible the people with whom they have been in contact.
And for good reason, more contagious, the variants could cause an acceleration of the epidemic.
Today this does not concern antigenic tests, those often done in barnums in front of pharmacies.
A "bad" influence on the patient
Warn the patient, the strategy is questionable, according to Jean-Michel Pawlotsky.
“The main thing is that the information goes back into the databases for collective monitoring.
There is no individual logic to be had, blows the head of the medical biology pole at the Henri-Mondor hospital in Créteil (Val-de-Marne).
This wrongly influences the behavior of the patient according to
his
variant.
However, I remind you, you have to isolate yourself and be very careful, whatever version of the virus you are carrying!
"
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As a specialist in these questions, the professor points out, there are today two methods for identifying mutations.
“The first one - by these specific kits or one called Thermo Fischer - is only a suspicious approach of the English and South African variants.
It allows us to say that it is their progression and their influence on the number of cases in France.
The second is a sequencing technique (the complete analysis of the genome of the virus), which is without a priori.
It makes it possible to monitor the occurrence of mutations globally.
"
The very present English variant
Problem, on its sequencing policy, “not only has France had an ignition delay, but it is struggling to make up for it.
The information resulting from the monitoring of variants goes back very slowly, ”says Professor Bernard Charpentier, new president of the Academy of Medicine.
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At national level, the second “flash” survey would show that the circulation of variants is certainly increasing, but less than abroad.
However, in Ile-de-France, the Briton would already be around "15-20%", said Tuesday on France Info Rémi Salomon, the representative of the doctors of the Hospitals of Paris.
Figures that do not surprise Arnaud Chenebit, the biologist struck by the omnipresence of clones.
Out of the 400 tests carried out every day in his laboratory, 7 to 8% are positive and nearly 50% of these ... include the English variant.
VIDEO. How this laboratory manages to detect the English variant of Covid-19