"The Pascale Institute and the Federico II University have identified another variant of Covid-19, never identified before in Italy"
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This is what the Campania Region announces.
"At the moment, the power of infection or other characteristics of this variant are not known, as happens for many rare variants of the virus. It is called B.1.525, and so far only 32 cases have been identified in Great Britain, and a few cases also. in Nigeria, Denmark and the United States. Never before in Italy ", reads the note.
"A professional returning from a trip to Africa, after the swab, tested positive for Covid 19. Thanks to the collaboration between the Federico II and Pascale laboratories, Giuseppe Portella of Federico II identifies the highly suspicious case and in a very short time the he team of Nicola Normanno del Pascale has discovered a Covid variant never described in Italy so far ", reads the note.
"The sequence of the sample that came to us from the Policlinico Federiciano - explains the researcher of the Cancer Institute of Naples - immediately made us suspicious because it did not present similarities with other samples from our region.
After a comparison with the group of the Emerging Zoonosis Department of the Istituto Superiore di Sanità we had the confirmation that it is a variant described so far in about a hundred cases in some European and African countries, but also in the United States.
We immediately deposited the sequence in the international GISAID database and notified the health authorities ". In fact, all the foreseen procedures started immediately, starting with the contact tracing".