The Brazilian variant of coronaviru has arrived in Uruguay …

The Minister of Health of Uruguay, Daniel Salinas, confirmed this Thursday the entry into the country of a Brazilian variant of the new coronavirus, causing Covid-19 disease. “The entrance to a variant called P.2, from Brazil. Likewise, the Public Health Laboratory, Section of Virology Dr Chiparelli, continues monitoring after training with the Section of Virology of the Faculty of Sciences ”, announced the manager via his Twitter account.

Salinas added that “real-time molecular and genomic epidemiological monitoring and surveillance enables early detection of variants or mutations through viral genome sequencing.”

The variant would have entered the second half of December, according to researchers from the Borders Project, composed of the University of the Republic and the Pasteur Institute of Montevideo, added the minister.

The newspaper El País reported yesterday that one of the new variants of Covid-19, which has been developing in southern Brazil for about three months, it was found in four samples from patients in Uruguay. Uruguay has been registered so far 43,215 infections, of which 464 resulted in death of those who suffered them.

The Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) has reported that three new variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, those from the United Kingdom, South Africa and Brazil, have been identified so far in 20 countries of the Americas.

The first variant of the new coronavirus was detected in December 2019 in southeast China.