: A private pathology laboratory claims to have detected two cases of the South African variant of coronavirus in Punjab. Reuters/File
LAHORE: A private pathology laboratory claims to have detected two cases of the South African variant of coronavirus in Punjab and also confirmed predominance of the UK variant here during the third wave of the pandemic.
It stated that a research was carried out by the lab’s departments of virology and molecular genetics for which 62 Covid-19 samples had been collected at random at the end of March to be tested for their variant types.
The study concluded that 60 out of the 62 samples (97 per cent) contained the B.1.17 lineage (UK variant) and the remaining two had the B.1.351 lineage (South African variant) detected through a genomic study. It also concluded that the absence of the early variant of the virus (from Wuhan) indicated that the virus had mutated itself completely from the original strain.