French Covid-19 variant will be investigated "in a lot of detail"

Thursday 18 March 2021

The emergence of a new variant of Covid-19 that appears to evade detection by PCR tests will be considered "in a lot of detail" by our Director of Public Health.

Dr Nicola Brink confirmed that looking into the new strain of the corona virus, known as the Breton Variant, is on her 'to do list' in the coming days.

French health authorities have announced that a cluster of eight cases had been discovered in a hospital in Lannion, a northwestern town in Côtes d’Armour, Brittany, on 13 March.

While each of the patients returned a negative PCR test, their infections emerged after sequencing of their swab samples. It is believed to be the first time that Covid-19 has mutated in a way that can avoid testing. 

Pictured: Dr Nicola Brink answered questions about the Breton Variant at yesterday's media briefing, the last one to be held remotely. 

Further investigations are underway to better understand this variant, its impact and the way it responds to vaccinations, with Dr Brink saying she will be monitoring developments closely. 

"We are aware of the Breton variant that has been picked up, but we are yet to receive the full sequence," she said.

"I don’t think there’s data out yet on either transmissibility or virulence, but of course this is all very new and we will be looking at it in a lot of detail in the days to come.

"It is on my to-do list for today and tomorrow - it is something I will be looking at in detail."

Early indications from French health authorities are that the variant appears to avoid detection with PCR tests, which involve swabbing the throat and nose, which travellers and those in the Covid-19 testing tent will be familiar with. 

However Guernsey testing will not necessarily be evaded in the same way, according to Dr Brink, due to different methods. 

Pictured: The Civil Contingencies Authority is planning to re-open the island's borders without travel restrictions on 1 July. Condor said last week that it will not require a negative test from passengers prior to travel. 

She said: "When we designed our diagnostic testing, we always said we would never target one region of the viral genome because that then makes your testing fragile to any genetic variation in the virus.

"What we will be doing doing now is mapping back to the areas we target, see what degree of genetic mismatch there is and see how our test would pick that up. Because we test multiple regions of the viral genome, our testing is far more robust."