This Thursday, a 26th case of the Breton variant was confirmed at the Guingamp hospital center. The spread of this new form of covid-19 seems to be limited to Trégor. To date, 12 patients have died from it. Frail, elderly and / or people with co-morbidities.
However, it is impossible to conclude that there is a higher mortality caused by this variant compared to the others. The problem lies in the difficulty of detecting this mutant which often nestles deep in the respiratory system, rendering conventional nasopharyngeal PCR tests negative. “We have a surveillance bias. We have the results where we are able to find the virus. That is to say in the hospital, in people intubated in intensive care, for whom we can perform effective deep samples,” explains Alain Le Tertre, head of the Brittany unit of Public Health France.
