Guyanese authorities are monitoring developments regarding the discovery of a new Covid-19 variant in France called IHU.
Health Minister Dr Frank Anthony weighed in on this discovery during his daily update today.
“With this new variant, it has been recently sequenced in France, and they have found that it differs from other existing variants,” Dr Anthony explained.
According to reports, this new variant has 46 mutations and 37 deletions and was said to be brought to France by someone from Cameroon.
“They think that this particular variant is going to behave differently,” he explained.
“Right now, in the part of France where they initially discovered it, there were twelve patients now. They estimate close to 955 patients…and they are also seeing in that region, a higher amount of hospitalisation, but all these things they have to investigate them more thoroughly to see whether it’s directly linked with this new variant that they have discovered, so a lot still has to be done. A lot of information is not known, this is relatively new, so as it’s investigated then well know more,” the Minister further explained.
