They have detected a Uruguayan variant of the new coronavirus

As the world fears the rapid expansion of the Delta variant of the novel coronavirus, Uruguayan scientists have announced that The first wave of COVID-19 infections in that country late last year was due to a local mutation of SARS-CoV-2.

The world is focusing today on the Delta variant, which appeared in India last December, with high transmissibility, which is why the announcement is relevant for scientific studies, since it was reported that it has ceased circulation and that there have been no cases since last April. Meanwhile, the Delta is growing and, studies by the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC, for its acronym in English) have confirmed the high contagiousness, but also ensured that 99.99% of people vaccinated with the complete regimen avoid hospitalization and death.

In Argentina, concern is growing regarding this variant, although it has not yet been documented that it is of community circulation, and the concern centers on the fact that the government may move forward in the application of the second doses, especially for people over 50 years of age and those with co-morbidities. To date, according to the Infobae Data Unit, 54.93 percent of Argentina’s population, or 25,161,679 people, have received at least one dose of coronavirus vaccine. However, only 7,130,429 people, 15.57 percent, were those who had already completed the immunization schedule.

The Institut Pasteur in Uruguay, based in Montevideo, said in a statement that variant P.6 was generated in this country, but was later moved by P.1, also known as Brazilian, who circulates predominantly among the Uruguayan population, for which he estimated that this country’s variant stopped producing infections since the end of April last year and has now disappeared.

The discovery of the Uruguayan variant was made by researchers from the Inter-institutional Working Group (GTI), which performs genomic surveillance. According to the studies of this team of scientists, the variant appeared in November 2020 and prevailed in number of infections until March 2021.

“P.6 – according to the name given by an international scientific committee – owes its name to the fact that it derives from the variant B.1.1.28, originating and widely distributed in Brazil in 2020”, explains the text. According to the Institute, the international scientific committee establishes that, to be considered a variant, the discovery “must have mutations that distinguish it from existing variants” and that the geographic expansion must be different from the original, in the occurrence Wuhan, China.

“The Uruguayan variant includes two relevant mutations located in the Spike protein, which could be associated with increased transmissibility. One of the mutations has also been detected in other variants of the world, increasing its frequency towards the end of 2020, which would support the idea that it may give it greater transmission capacity, ”he says.

According to the same surveys, after its appearance last November, the Uruguayan variant was predominant in the country between January and February, but its prevalence began to decline in March, when P1 entered and became community circulation. The last recorded case of the Uruguayan variant dates from April 26.

“Scientists believe that the Uruguayan variant would have played an important role in the first wave of COVID-19 in the country, since observed a coincidence between the emergence and spread of this local variant with the increase in COVID-19 cases recorded from November / December “, concluded the Institut Pasteur in the press release.

Since December 2020, Uruguay has seen a strong growth in COVID-19 cases and this has worsened since March with the arrival of Brazilian P1. From there, positive cases and deaths rose exponentially and it wasn’t until June that the numbers improved, helped by the vaccination of a high percentage of the population.

Country of 3.5 million adds 381,569 COVID-19 cases since the start of the health emergency, which was declared in Uruguay on March 13, 2020, including 1,967 people with the disease, 53 of them admitted to intensive treatment centers (ICS) and 5,966 deceased.

Uruguay was one of the countries that did not enforce a strict quarantine, but its government chose to call on the company to stay home when the number of cases started to rise. It was viewed early in the pandemic as a successful country case in infection control, but infections then got out of hand and the death toll increased rapidly.

Uruguay has reached 70% of its population inoculated with at least one dose against the coronavirus, according to the official vaccination monitor, against the backdrop of a sharp slowdown in the worst indicators of the pandemic, although 10% of people authorized to be vaccinated have not yet done so. Thus, about 2.48 million people received at least the first injection of Sinovac, Pfizer or AstraZeneca vaccines. Of these, the vast majority (2.09 million or 59% of the population) already have the full plan.

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