03/03/2021 15:38
Clarín.com
Society
Updated 03/03/2021 3:43 PM
A new report by the PAIS Project, dependent on the Ministry of Science of the Nation, confirmed that in Argentina there
is
already
community circulation of the United Kingdom and Rio de Janeiro variants of
the coronavirus.
The data comes from the report N ° 16 of Surveillance of variants of SARS-CoV-2, which was published hours before one year of the first detection of Covid-19 in Argentina.
The United Kingdom variant was identified in three cases: two presented a travel history and the third was the
first case of community circulation of this variant
reported in our country.
As it transpired, it would be a patient from La Matanza.
This variant has already been reported in more than 80 countries.
In the region, there have already been cases in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Peru and Uruguay, within South America.
In our country it was detected for the first time on January 15: it is an Argentine patient, residing in the United Kingdom, who had traveled to Austria and Germany;
and arrived in the country from Frankfurt at the end of December 2020.
"In relation to the P.2 lineage (Rio de Janeiro), in this report 14 cases with the S_E484K mutation are described and in one of them, its assignment to the P.2 lineage was confirmed by sequencing the entire genome. the active surveillance of the variants, the S_E484K mutation was detected in 27 cases, and
in seven of them the identification of the P.2 variant (Rio de Janeiro) was confirmed
, while others are in the process of sequencing, "he explained. the PAIS consortium.
All the cases corresponded to
community circulation in AMBA
, possibly from different introductions to the country
The Rio variant has already been detected in at least 17 countries.
The report also gives an account of the detection of two cases of the Manaus variant - an Argentine patient and a Brazilian patient - but one had a travel history and another was close contact of a positive case that had recently been in Brazil.
"Variants 501Y.V1 (United Kingdom), 501Y.V2 (South Africa) and 501Y.V3 (Manaus, Brazil) have recently been associated with
a higher transmission rate
or a drastic increase in their prevalence in a short time," he details. the report and adds that "only in the case of the 501Y.V1 variant (United Kingdom) was, in preliminary analyzes, a possible association with an increased relative risk of death (NERVTAG, 2021)".
