Guyana is expected to increase its testing for variants of the novel coronavirus through a new partnership with the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, USA.
This announcement was made during yesterday’s COVID-19 update where the Minister of Health, Dr Frank Anthony disclosed that the ministry has been looking at developing partnerships to be able to do more gene sequencing and in turn, testing for the different mutations of COVID-19.
“We have started by working with CARPHA [Caribbean Public Health Agency]. We had sent ten samples to CARPHA and we are going to continue to explore that avenue of sending the ten samples per month to CARPHA, but we have also been fortunate to work along with the Mount Sinai group and in particular the Icahn School of Medicine.” Anthony said.
Giving details about the partnership, he noted that the school has a special department which has been conducting research using genetic sequencing and since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, has been tracking the evolution of the virus around the world. He mentioned that the school has been working with a number of other countries and has been accepting samples to have them sequenced.
“So we have started this partnership with them and very shortly we intend to send these samples to them so that they can help us to analyze and see what are the variants that are circulating,” the minister added.
He underscored how important having the variants tracked was as some of the mutations can have faster transmission and thus complicate how they can be treated, among other issues.
Dr Anthony also noted that there are a few things that the health authorities here wanted to know which led to them seeking out gene sequencing. “We know Brazil has the P1 variant. People who might be coming across from the border we want to know whether or not there is any indication of the variant coming into Guyana.”
He added that attempts will be made to get closer to those areas to try and detect samples coming out from those regions and have those samples sent for sequencing. Also mentioned was that the health authorities believe that there are cases of reinfections, and as such they will attempt to ascertain whether persons who were re-infected had different mutations of the virus.
“We wanted to know whether someone was infected with let’s say, a variant earlier in the pandemic and now they got re-infected with a new variant, and if that is the case what are the differences and to better try to understand that” the health minister explained.
Additionally he revealed that the authorities have some suspected samples which they think might support their suspicion and as such the gene sequencing will give a better understanding.
