Ministry of Health: New strain of SARS-Cov-2 detected in UK has not been confirmed in Romania

The Ministry of Health states that, on the Romanian territory, the new SARS-Cov-2 variant detected in the United Kingdom has not been confirmed so far, and the confirmation procedure will be finalized in the next days. "A new strain can be confirmed only by the health institutes or units' sequencing of the viral genome, and this technical procedure will be finalized in the coming days starting from the samples selected after RT-PCR testing," reads a statement from the Ministry of Health sent to AGERPRES on Sunday. The Ministry of Health's update comes after information appeared in the press on Sunday that the new strain was confirmed in some samples from patients suspected of COVID-19 in the genetics laboratory of the 'Matei Bals' Institute in Bucharest. A representative of the 'Matei Bals' Institute stated that two samples analyzed in this laboratory had different results from those known so far. "In the genetics laboratory of the Institute, two samples had different results of the amplification reaction than we knew so far. The sequencing will be conducted in the next days and we will see if the new strain of the virus is really confirmed. We do not have data that there would be significant differences in the clinical manifestation compared to the old strain," the spokesperson of the 'Matei Bals' Institute, Catalin Apostolescu, told private broadcaster DIGI 24. AGERPRES (RO - author: Livia Popescu, editor: Marius Fratila; EN - editor: Simona Iacob)