The estimate of the incidence of variants on national Covid infections is growing.
In some regions it would have reached about 50% (compared to the figure found by the ISS of about 18% 10 days ago) with a very high growth prospect.
That Gb, in fact said the president of the Superior Health Council, is destined to become dominant.
And in the labs in the coming weeks a quick test will arrive that will help to find out if a positive case at Covid has been infected with one of the three main ones in circulation.
While the Italian scientists, on the push of the Gb model, work to put a national center on the network.
From mid-March a quick test can be used in laboratories to check, on people already identified as positive for coronavirus, if they have been infected with one of the three most popular variants: the English, the Brazilian and the South African, he explains. Massimo Ciccozzi, the molecular epidemiologist of the Campus Biomedico University of Rome, one of the institutes that will receive it.
"This is a molecular test on the genome, already tested - explained Ciccozzi - in this way it will be possible to quickly identify (about 2 hours) if a person is affected by a variant. On the basis of the result obtained, the sample must then be sequenced to understand which variant it is. In this way it will be possible to have the prevalence of the variants that circulate ".
On the situation in our country, Ciccozzi explained that all the variants refer to cases of people who had traveled.
At the moment, however, there is no structured system in Italy to go and see how the virus changes.
In the UK, 30 million pounds were invested in a government-funded consortium that brings together research institutes and universities with the task of mapping everything that is emerging, "but work is underway to create a center also in Italy", he reports. the virologist Carlo Perno, director of the Microbiology Unit of the Bambino Gesu 'Hospital in Rome.
"There are thousands of coronavirus mutations but there are only three variants that matter: the Gb, the South African and the Brazilian." Viruses generate variants and in this case, all in all, it happens in a contained way, unlike other viruses like that of hepatitis C and HIV.
The goal must be to reduce the production of new variants, reducing the spread of the virus ", concluded Perno. In the Regions where there has been a rapid increase in cases such as Abruzzo, Marche, Tuscany and Umbria, as well as in the autonomous provinces of Trento and Bolzano, the variants of Sars-Cov-2 would be, according to the simulations on the trend of hospitalized patients, already between 40 and 50% of the total positives. And this trend is increasing, explains the physicist Corrado Spinella, director of the Department of Physical Sciences and Technologies of Matter at Cnr, thanks to a simulation based on an algorithm that defines Sars-Cov-2 "Variant-finder".