The so-called British strain of the coronavirus is already in Lanzarote, and arrived weeks ago. This was confirmed this Tuesday by the Ministry of Health, which has just analyzed a hundred samples collected between December 18 and January 18, which had not been able to be sequenced until now to determine whether or not they corresponded to this new variant of SARS-CoV-2.
Now, the result of that analysis has confirmed that almost half of those samples, specifically 49, effectively correspond to the B.1.1.7 variant or British variant, and four of them came from Lanzarote. Another 34 were taken on the island of Tenerife - with some cases linked to an outbreak in La Palma at the end of December - and another four are from foreign citizens, two from Great Britain and two from Italy, although the Ministry of Health does not specify on which island they were. As for the rest, the Ministry points out that "its traceability is being worked on".
As a result of these results, the Ministry of Health has announced that "from this week this sequencing work will continue to be carried out with all suspicious samples, with special interest in the islands of Lanzarote and Gran Canaria, where the greatest increases in the incidence of the virus are occurring".
Regarding the 100 that have been analyzed so far, they corresponded to cases "in which the presence of one of the variants was suspected", but required a specific study. Initially, it was proposed to send these samples to the Peninsula, but given the saturation of the reference center, an agreement was reached to be able to analyze them at the Nuestra Señora de Candelaria University Hospital.
"This technology has already been successfully tested. The Canary Islands has already validated and consolidated its technology for the tasks of RNA extraction and massive genomic sequencing of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that gives rise to the COVID-19 disease", they point out from the Ministry. In the first results obtained, it is observed that none of the samples corresponds to the so-called South African or Brazilian variants, but to the British one.
In this regard, the Ministry of Health recalls that "the British variant of SARS-CoV-2 has already been found in other Spanish autonomous communities such as Madrid, Andalusia, Valencia, Navarra and Galicia, among others".
In addition, they emphasize that during the month in which these samples were taken, some 7,239 people tested positive for Covid-19 in the Canary Islands, so they conclude that the 49 cases of the British variant "would represent approximately 0.67 percent of the total in that period of time." However, the specific analysis to confirm whether a case corresponds to the new variants has only been done on 100 samples.