It is in the Côtes d’Armor, in a hospital center in Lannion that a new variant was detected in hospitalized patients. At this stage, the Brittany Regional Health Agency ensures that this variant is not more dangerous than the original strain. This variant would have caused the death of eight elderly people with co-morbidities. “These patients were hospitalized with a fairly critical clinical condition”, said Stéphane Mulliez, director of the Brittany Regional Health Agency. “No causal link has yet been confirmed. This new strain of SARS-COV-2 has just been classified as” variant to follow ”because out of 8 RT-PCR tests, 7 were negative.
A “flash” survey is carried out to study the sequencing of RT-PCR samples
Health authorities are currently in the dark with this new strain. So far, 79 positive cases have been recorded in the Lannion hospital center. Among these cases, the Breton variant has been identified. The health authorities want to dispel doubts and understand the dangerousness of this new variant, called “variant 20.C” or “variant of Trégor”. Thus, a flash investigation is underway in order to understand how this new strain can escape the nasopharyngeal tests of RT-PCR. “One of the leads is that the virus travels faster between the upper respiratory tract and the lower respiratory tract”, indicated the head of the regional unit of Public Health France, Alain Tertre. “But these are assumptions”, he explained. The appearance of the 20.C variant is not unexpected. In November 2020, the American magazine Nature published the figure of 12,000 SARS-COV-2 mutations since its discovery. Some are harmless, others can be more dangerous like the variant “VoC 202012/01” better known as “British variant”.
In addition, the spokesperson of the Government, Gabriel Attal, declared at the exit of the Defense Council of March 17 that “These variants continue to change the game. We monitor them scrupulously. This is the case with the variants that we have clearly identified. This is also the case for variants which may emerge and which have emerged until recently, such as the Trégor variant, which has been identified in several patients at the Lannion hospital ”.
