Covid Outbreak In China Caused By Existing Strains

(CTN News) – An outbreak of Covid-19 that is now hitting China is being caused by strains of the virus that have already circled the globe, with no signs of significant strain mutations arising yet, according to officials of a global consortium that is monitoring the outbreak.

The Chinese government has submitted 25 new genetic samples from Beijing, Inner Mongolia and Guangzhou that have been collected in the past month to GISAID.

This is a database in which researchers around the world share sequences of Covidin order to monitor the evolution of the Covid virus.

Scientists have tracked the pathogen’s movement in China and provided reassurance about its direction thus far.

This is done by monitoring small changes, which occur naturally as the virus spreads from one person to another. This occurs as it spreads from person to person.

Peter Bogner, the chief executive officer of GISAID, said in a telephone interview that there is no evidence at this point to suggest that the newly discovered variants have any significance at this time.

Data collected from genetic samples can provide a snapshot of the current situation in China, according to Sebastian Maurer-Stroh, a chief scientist at GISAID’s global data science center in Singapore.

In his view, the company has been circulating imported strains rather than brewing its own variant, rather than brewing its own.

Concerns related to variants

As a result of the outbreak in China, which could be experiencing as many as 37 million cases of infections a day in some areas, some global health authorities and governments have expressed concerns about the potential development of novel variants of the disease that would once again spread throughout the world.

Therefore, it is difficult to predict how the virus will behave in China in the future, given its earlier no-tolerance policy and reliance on inactivated vaccines.

It has been found that the samples submitted by the Chinese Centers for Disease Covid  Control and Prevention are closely correlated with existing strains identified in GISAID’s 14.4 million Covid genomes, according to GISAID officials.

During the summer of this year, the closest genomes to subvariants of Omicron known as BF.7 and BA.5.2 were collected in the United States and Russia.

According to Maurer-Stroh, there were several independent imports of infection among the cases in Guangzhou, which was composed of the earlier BA.5.2 omicron subvariant.

A more recent BF.7 variant caused the Inner Mongolia outbreak, which spread to Beijing.

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