MOSCOW, January 15. /TASS/. Test systems to distinguish between the usual coronavirus and the coronavirus with mutations may be developed in the Russian Federation, the production may take about 2-3 weeks, Head of the Federal Service for Surveillance on Consumer Rights Protection and Human Wellbeing Anna Popova stated on Friday.
"Today we can obtain test systems, I think that this should take no more than 2-3 weeks, which will differentiate between the regular virus and the virus with a mutation. I would like to say that this is not an isolated story, <...> we will develop such a test system. We have acquired a tool which allows us to detect various changes in the virus," she said at a meeting with leading epidemiologists and virologists.
On December 14, 2020, Britain’s Secretary of State for Health and Social Care Matt Hancock said British scientists had identified a new coronavirus strain that might be to blame for high infection rates in southeastern England. According to him, a preliminary analysis indicated that this newly detected virus strain was spreading faster than any of the known strains. UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson at an emergency news conference on December 19 announced that, according to the current findings, the new strain might be 70% more contagious.
Earlier at the Gaidar Forum, the top sanitary doctor reported that almost 1,500 mutations of the coronavirus had been detected in Russia. The agency noted that these mutations do not influence the course of the disease.