A World Health Organisation (WHO) official has said a new strain of coronavirus in the South East was identified in September.
Appearing on the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show, Maria Van Kerkhove, Covid-19 technical lead at WHO, said: “The UK had picked this up in September and seeing that this has been circulating in south-east England since September.”
She said that “there are mutations that are identified all the time”, adding: “What is really important is that there’s a process in place to understand what these variants do and how they behave.”
Ms Van Kerkhove said the variant had also been identified in Denmark, the Netherlands and Australia – with there being one case in the latter that did not spread further.
