Covid-19: no new variant identified in passengers from China

The ritual has already worked well. From January 1, any passenger arriving from China will likely be required to take a Covid test upon arrival in France, unless they are simply staying there. The goal is not so much to know if he was infected with SARS-CoV-2, but to determine which variant if positive, thanks to sequencing. So, do not miss a new undetected strain of the virus in France.

So far the data is encouraging. “All the variants we identified were already known in France,” points out Parisian Benoît Wissot, virologist at the Cerba laboratory responsible for sequencing positive samples from Paris’s Roissy-Charles de Gaulle airport until this week. .

These are, in particular, sub-strains belonging to the large family of the Omicron variant and present at a relatively low level for a more or less long time in France. “It was mostly BA.5.2, but also some BF.7 and sample BQ.1.1,” says the manager. Since mid-November, such Omicron BQ.1.1s have been the majority in France and most of Europe.

“Lack of adequate and transparent sequencing data”

Italy also already announced at the end of December that it had only identified strains of SARS-CoV-2 already known among passengers arriving from China. In recent days, the World Health Organization and the European Center for Disease Prevention have confirmed, based on information provided by China, that the variants circulating there are already known in Europe. But some opacity reigns over the Chinese data.

In late December, a US official criticized the “lack of adequate and transparent sequencing data” provided by China. Hence the tests introduced by many countries before leaving and/or upon arrival from the most populous country in the world.