Angola’s minister of health has dismissed reports that there is a new ‘Angolan variant’ of the coronavirus that cause Covid-19, saying that it was rather a strain that had been diagnosed in the country as a result of biosecurity checks taken during the disembarkation of passengers on international flights.
The minister, Silvia Lutucuta, speaking at a news conference late on Monday, rejected information that had been circulating about a new, more transmissible variant of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus in samples collected in Angola.
She recalled that at the end of December the multisectoral commission to fight Covid-19 and health institutions had mobilised to source genotyping and molecular tests capable of diagnosing new variants, with the focus on the UK, South African and Brazil variants, among others. These variants had already been identified as highly contagious, associated with relatively high mortality, including in young people without comorbidities, she noted.
In this context, Lutucuta continued, the National Health Research Institute, in partnership with South Africa’s Crispy laboratory, had been processing samples for the diagnosis of these variants by genotyping.
“And from the first consignment sent to South Africa we have already obtained results that we shared on the 5th of March, referring to the months of January and February,” she said. “We had seventeen cases: seven with the South African strain, five with the English strain, one case with a Nigerian strain and three cases with a new strain detected in three Tanzanian players, whose diagnosis was made in the immediate post-disembarkation at the Quatro de Fevereiro Airport and these players were immediately isolated in our institutional isolation centre in Barra do Kwanza, thus cutting the chain of transmission.”
With this explanation the minister of health sought to clear up “the news that has been circulating referring to a new variant” identified in the country.
“It is not a new Angolan variant, but a new variant that was diagnosed in Angola, as a result of the measures we have taken and the screening and testing process in the immediate landing that we have done at our Quatro de Fevereiro Airport,” said the minister, stressing that “one of the important weapons against Covid-19 is, on the one hand, epidemiological surveillance and, on the other, assertive laboratory surveillance.”
According to the minister, the country has these measures in place to check for the entry of any new strain in Angola.
“An RT-PCR test is done up to 72 hours before boarding, we make the antigen test immediately on landing at Quatro de Fevereiro Airport, these passengers are quarantined for up to ten days and a new test is done, and if the result is negative, the epidemiological discharge certificate is issued,” she said.
However, the minister said that the UK variant may already be in circulation in Luanda, given the number of cases in young people, teenagers and paediatric patients, with a number of patients critically ill with Covid-19 and deaths associated with the disease in these categories, which she said was “a warning sign” of the need to track new variants.
“Our laboratory in Viana has also recently received reagents capable of detecting the new UK variant and, in the last three days, in samples processed from positive cases, sixty-four cases of the new UK variant were detected,” she said. “We are also concerned about the fact that most of these samples are from patients that have no relation whatsoever with travelling or travellers and are samples from our sentinel hospitals, which are the national hospitals, including the paediatric hospital.”
Another concern for the authorities, the minister said, related to the public’s failure to observe measures outlined in the state of emergency decree, noting that “Covid-19 has not yet disappeared” in society.
“We have had an increase in cases in the last week,” she stressed, appealing for the public to collaborate and comply with biosecurity measures, which she described as “simple”, so that the gains made so far are not lost.
Angola on Monday reported the death of a health professional from Cuba among in the previous 24 hours, along with 86 new cases of the coronavirus that causes it and 573 people recovered from the disease.
Worldwide, the pandemic has claimed at least 2,853,908 lives worldwide, out of more than 131.2 million cases of infection.
The disease is transmitted by a new coronavirus first detected in late 2019 in Wuhan, a city in central China.
