Coronavirus

(asked on 30th June 2021) - View Source

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to ensure that new variants of covid-19 in the UK are identified as quickly as possible.


Answered by
Jo Churchill Portrait
Jo Churchill
Minister of State (Department for Work and Pensions)
This question was answered on 9th July 2021

New technology to rapidly detect new COVID-19 mutations is being deployed in NHS Test and Trace laboratories. Genotype assay testing is accelerating identification where a positive COVID-19 sample contains a mutation indicative of a known variant of concern and will be used in addition to standard testing decreasing the interval from approximately two weeks to two days.

Genotype assays complement existing surveillance work that uses genomic sequencing to look for variants in positive samples. Genomic sequencing surveillance will continue to detect and monitor how COVID-19 changes over time into new variants, by identifying new mutations in the viral genome. Where new variants or mutations are found, the technology can be adapted to track the variants of most concern.

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