Deadly coronavirus strain in France slipped through testing net, says study
- French researchers say a variant in the country’s west proved elusive to standard swab sampling
- But detection could be improved by going deeper in the lungs, they say
In a paper published on the preprint service medRxiv.org on Monday, researchers in western France said that only 15 per cent of patients in their study who had the B.1.616 variant tested positive in standard nasopharyngeal swabs, versus the 97 per cent hit rate for other variants circulating in France.
And nearly half of the patients died in less than a month, a much higher rate than the 16 per cent mortality among other hospitalised Covid-19 patients.
“[The] new variant [is] poorly detected ... with high lethality,” the researchers led by Pierre Fillatre, from the Centre Hospitalier de Saint-Brieuc, said in the paper. The study has not been peer reviewed.
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An infectious disease researcher with the Institute of Microbiology under the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing said the variant, first detected in France earlier this year, had made the Chinese health authorities “quite nervous”.
