The Ministry of Health suspects that the ‘British’ more transmissible and infectious strain of the coronavirus may already be circulating in the Canary Islands, brought back by a woman residing in La Palma who returned from the UK at Christmas with a negative antigen test, but who tested positive just two days later with a PCR, when she began to develop symptoms.
Once she landed on the island, the young woman decided went to several parties, where at the moment it is known that she infected at least two other people, the same two who today will be fined for breaking quarantine rules knowing that they were in close contact of someone who had tested positive for Covid-19 before getting their test results.
To determine this, the General Hospital of La Palma has carried out a second more in-depth experiment on the nasopharyngeal sample of the woman, in which the part of the virus genome that contains the mutations found in the United Kingdom is being looked for. This sample is heated and that part of the genome is "amplified" as with any other PCR. However, on this occasion, if a positive result does not appear, the health workers have provisionally considered, although with a certainty of 90%, that it may be the English variant of the strain.
However, as reported by the Ministry of Health, to ensure that the variant of the virus has begun to circulate on La Palma, a more extensive study based on genetic sequencing of the sample must be carried out. This will be done by the Hospital Universitario Nuestra Señora de La Candelaria, who, as soon as the reagents arrive at the end of this week, will carry out the sequencing of the virus to ascertain if it really is the variant found in UK.
As with the female patient, the Canary Islands Health Council also intends to carry out this sequencing on the samples of the two people who skipped the quarantine after being infected by it in a bar in La Palma, to see if they are carrying the new more infectious strain of the virus. The results are expected over the weekend.
