France announced this Tuesday, January 4, that a new COVID-19 variant of concern has been identified, referred to temporarily as B.1.640.2, according to the French media outlet L’indépendant.
Nearly a month ago, experts from the Marseille University Hospital Institute for Infectious Diseases (IHU) detected the presence of the new COVID-19 variant in the South of France, infecting twelve people from the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence region.
The variant was first identified in Congo, and then detected in France in September. The World health organization (WHO) has placed the newly identified variant under surveillance due to the presence of 46 mutations and 37 deletions, according to researchers at IHU whose study is yet to be peer-reviewed.
Recently, the European country has been facing the fifth wave of the COVID-19 pandemic and the spread of Omicron throughout its regions.
COVID-19 infections are at an all-time high in France, with 162,041 new cases reported on average each day, according to Reuters’ latest COVID Tracker, released this Tuesday.
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