COLOMBO – Sri Lanka’s current COVID-19 outbreak is caused by a strain of the SARSCoV-2 found in Denmark and Sweden, researchers who have sequenced its gene have found.
A team from Sri Lanka’s Sri Jayewardenepura University that also examined viruses from earlier clusters collaborating with their counterparts in UK, have said the current strain is a new one after sequencing 16 samples.
“This virus belongs to B.1.42 lineage which is found in countries like Denmark and Sweden,” Chandima Jeewandara, a senior lecturer at Sri Lanka’s Sri Jayewardenepura University who is a member of research team told a private television channel.
“It also has a mutation called D614G, which makes it highly transmissible,” he said adding that the mutation was present in 15 of the 16 samples examined.
Doctors have said the patients had higher viral loads when tested than in earlier outbreaks and it was spreading faster.
Sri Lanka found one Chinese national early in 2020 during the Wuhan Wave and many small clusters from index cases that came from several European countries, India and Indonesia in the second Wave in March and April.
All samples of SARS-Cov-2 probed were similar, Jeewandara said, observing that there appeared to be only one strain causing the outbreak, and it had not been found in Sri Lanka before.
The findings came as Sri Lanka’s State health system relaxed discharge criteria for recovered patients to a single negative test result from two earlier.
PCR tests have a 70% success rate, officials have said.
Sri Lanka has also ended institutionalized quarantine and is home quarantining person including in areas which are not locked down, as patient and contact numbers exceeded 6,000 and former quarantine facilities were converted to treatment centres.
There have been seven confirmed deaths attributed to the current outbreak, taking total deaths to 20.
One person also died while waiting for a PCR at a hospital, who was said to have been asthmatic and another died while on the way to a quarantine centres.
-economynext.com