Belgium announced on Monday that the variant of the coronavirus identified in the United Kingdom has been circulating in Belgium for at least a month, along with the Netherlands and Italy, which have also announced that they have discovered that strain.
“This variant is not limited to the United Kingdom, it has been found in other places in the world, including the Netherlands and Belgium,” said Yves Van Laethem, spokesman for the technical team against the corona virus, at a press conference on Monday.
The virologist added that “there are currently 4 known cases in Belgium and that detection was done a month ago.”
“It is possible that more cases are circulating in our country and in other countries of continental Europe,” said Van Laethem.
The virologist recalled that this mutation has been known “since September” and currently represents “60% of new infections in the UK”.
“There are other variants circulating in our country and other countries (…). It is completely normal for variants to appear” and “eventually become dominant,” added Van Laethem, who indicated that it is not known whether the new variant is transferred with easier and “we still have to wait to have some amount of data to see if it is really more contagious”.
“In any case, nothing shows us that it is more violent, aggressive or more dangerous to our health. Nothing shows us that it prevents vaccines from giving us immunity to Covid marked with that variant,” he added.
The Belgian expert attributed the fact that the variant was identified in the United Kingdom to the fact that that country has “one of the most efficient and comprehensive genetic surveillance and research programs in the world”, making it “systematically between 5 and 10% of the samples to know their genetic makeup “.
“Many other countries are much more limited in the percentage of samples they study in depth,” said Van Laethem, who pointed out that the UK is not the only place where infections are significantly on the rise, which is also the case in the Netherlands. Denmark, Czech Republic and Slovakia. .
In any case, he recommended “not to travel and to limit travel as much as possible”.
Belgium, like Germany, France, the Netherlands, Italy or Austria, Canada or Israel, announced this Sunday that it will temporarily close air and train connections with the United Kingdom for at least 24 hours because of the new variant of the corona virus that is in that country.
EPIDEMIOLOGICAL SITUATION
According to Monday’s epidemiological bulletin, infections in Belgium have risen by 13% in the past week to 2,547 new daily cases and the number of deaths has risen by a symbolic 0.2%, which is the first time this indicator has turned red in weeks.
However, hospital admissions continue to decline slowly, 3% per week, and the cumulative incidence increases by 5% to 292.3 new cases per day averaging over 100,000 residents in the past 14 days.
“The number of infections continues to increase, but it has not been going so fast for a few days. It remains a source of concern (…) but now we don’t see what we see in other neighboring countries in Europe, with many increases. More importantly”, said the spokesman.
Van Laethem added that “some of these cases” are responding to more tests being done, with an 18% weekly increase to an average of 37,600 daily tests and that the positivity is declining, although “slow,” and currently stands at 7% .