The net is closing in on the mystery patient with the Brazilian coronavirus mutation after the search has been narrowed down to 379 households.
Matt Hancock announced earlier today that extra steps are being taken to find a patient who tested positive for the mutant strain but didn’t fill in their form correctly.
Six cases of the Brazilian strain of Covid-19 were recently identified in the UK, five of which have been tracked and are currently quarantining at home.
The health secretary updated the Commons on the government’s progress in tracking the missing sixth case down, according to The Mirror.
The hunt has been narrowed down to households in the south-east of England.
He said: “We know that five of these six people quarantined at home as they were legally required to do.”
“We’re stepping up our testing and sequencing in south Gloucestershire as a precaution.
“We have no information to suggest the variant has spread further.
“Unfortunately one of these six cases completed a test but didn’t successfully complete the contact details. Incidents like this are rare and only occur in around 0.1% of tests.”
Public Health England has found six UK cases of the P1 strain first detected in the Brazilian city of Manaus.
Two in England are from the same home in South Gloucestershire after one person returned from Brazil on February 10 – days before the Government’s hotel self-isolation rule came into effect.
Three cases involve Scottish residents who flew to Aberdeen from Brazil via Paris and London, who all tested positive while self-isolating.
But it remains a mystery if the missing patient with the Manaus variant slipped into the UK before the hotel quarantine system was introduced last month, or whether they contracted the virus here.
“Our current vaccines have not yet been studied against this variant and we’re working to understand what impact it might have, but we do know that this variant has caused significant challenges in Brazil, so we’re doing all we can to stop the spread of this new variant in the UK, to analyse its effects and to develop an updated vaccine that works on all these variants of concern and protect the progress that we’ve made as a nation,” said Matt Hancock
He added that one in four people in England are now estimated to have antibodies against Covid-19.
He told the Commons: “This morning, the Office for National Statistics published new data on the levels of protection people have.
“They show that up to February 11, one in four people are estimated to have antibodies against coronavirus in England, up from one in five.
“The levels are highest in the over-80s, the first group to be vaccinated, showing again the protection from the vaccine across the country.”
