Japan is trying to isolate a new variant of the coronavirus, recently detected in four people from Brazil, to better analyze it, authorities said Tuesday.
“To further analyze the variant, we must first isolate it,” a head of the Japanese Ministry of Health explained to AFP.
“That could take several weeks to several months” and “therefore it is difficult to say now when we will be able to give details,” the source added.
Japan announced on Sunday that it had detected a new variant of coronavirus, without being able to immediately determine if it was more contagious or dangerous than the already known variants.
The variant was discovered in two adults and two children who arrived in Japan on January 2 from Brazil, the Japanese health authorities had announced.
One of the people, a man in his forties, was hospitalized due to breathing difficulties.
The woman and one of the children, a boy, had moderate symptoms, authorities said. The fourth person, a girl, is asymptomatic.
Over the weekend, Japan notified the World Health Organization (WHO) about this new variant.
“The more covid-19 spreads, the more likely it is to continue evolving … The transmissibility of some variants of the virus appears to be increasing,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Monday.
All mutations in a virus are not necessarily more contagious or dangerous.
But discoveries in December of a highly contagious variant of Covid-19 in the UK and later in South Africa caused great concern around the world, raising questions about the efficacy of vaccines against a possible ultra-resistant form of the coronavirus. .
The National Institute of Infectious Diseases (NIID, for its acronym in English), specified that the variant discovered in Japan had similarities with those of the United Kingdom and South Africa.
nf-sah-etb / pz / zm / mar
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