Re­search by the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies (UWI) has con­firmed that the new Unit­ed King­dom and South African vari­ants of the COVID-19 virus are not in cir­cu­la­tion in T&T.

The an­nounce­ment came from pro­fes­sor of Mol­e­c­u­lar Bi­ol­o­gy and Vi­rol­o­gy, Chris­tine Car­ring­ton.

“We have al­so screened oth­er sam­ples pro­vid­ed by the Trinidad and To­ba­go Min­istry of Health and by CARPHA for both the UK vari­ant and the South African vari­ants that are of con­cern. So far we have not de­tect­ed...any of them in the Trinidad and To­ba­go sam­ples,” she said.

To test for these new vari­ants, Prof Car­ring­ton ex­plained the left­over ge­net­ic ma­te­r­i­al from the test­ing process for the pub­lic was used. “When swabs are tak­en from in­di­vid­u­als for di­ag­nos­tic test­ing, the first step that hap­pens is they ex­tract ge­net­ic ma­te­r­i­al from that sam­ple and that is what they use to do the PCR test to de­tect whether the virus is present (in that per­son) or not,” she said.

“When they ex­tract that RNA, they don’t need all of it for the di­ag­nos­tic test­ing. Usu­al­ly, they have ex­cess and that is stored in a freez­er. That is where we were get­ting our ma­te­r­i­al from so they would share that ma­te­r­i­al with us.”

She said they used stored sam­ples from around the time the vari­ants were known to be cir­cu­lat­ing in­ter­na­tion­al­ly as well as sam­ples col­lect­ed more re­cent­ly. This, she said, al­lows them to ob­serve the virus’ evo­lu­tion.

“By analysing the ge­net­ic se­quence of the virus in the sam­ple, what we can do is de­ter­mine the par­tic­u­lar lin­eage of the virus that it be­longs to, and there is a lot of oth­er...in­fer­ences that we can make about the virus. (For in­stance) how it is spread­ing and how dif­fer­ent lin­eages are con­nect­ed and things like that,” she said. 

The new vari­ant was dis­cov­ered to be cir­cu­lat­ing in the Unit­ed King­dom mid-De­cem­ber.

Al­though in­ves­ti­ga­tions are on­go­ing in­to it, of­fi­cials be­lieve the strain is more eas­i­ly trans­mis­si­ble than oth­ers. How­ev­er, ear­ly in­di­ca­tions do not in­di­cate that it is more dead­ly nor that it would com­pro­mise the ef­fi­ca­cy and ef­fec­tive­ness of the COVID-19 vac­cines. (RK)