Despite efforts to improve its variant surveillance policy, France is still lagging behind.
To know precisely the identity card of a virus and therefore to know whether it is the “historical” strain or one of its known or unknown variants, it is necessary to analyze its genome.
However, the results of this sequencing are obtained with a considerable delay, to such an extent that when they are announced, they reveal a geographic distribution that is one month old and, what is more, distorted.
Read also: Covid-19: is the effect of variants on the epidemic already clearly visible?
This is the objective of the “flash surveys” carried out for the moment every two weeks.
This involves sequencing a fraction of the positive samples, currently around a thousand.
But collecting and reporting information is complex.
Thus, it was not until March 11, 2021 that the third "flash survey", which focused on the surveillance of variants on February 16 in France, was unveiled.
The method used to draw the samples to be sequenced has been contested by experts:
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