Hunt for missing virus case narrows
THE hunt for a missing person infected with a Manaus variant of coronavirus has been narrowed down to 379 households in the south east of England, Health Secretary Matt Hancock has told MPs.
To date, six cases of the variant of concern have been found in the UK – three in Scotland and three in England.
A public appeal has been made for one of those people in England to come forward after they took a test in February but left no contact details.
Mr Hancock told the Commons the appeal had resulted in a number of leads and it was thought the affected person took a home test. “We know that five of these six people quarantined at home as they were legally required to do,” he said of the six UK cases. “We’re stepping up our testing and sequencing in south Gloucestershire as a precaution. We have no information to suggest the variant has spread further.
“Unfortunately, one of these six cases completed a test but didn’t successfully complete the contact details. Incidents like this are rare and only occur in around 0.1% of tests. We’ve identified the batch of home test kits in question, our search has narrowed
from the whole country down to 379 households in the south-east of England and we’re contacting each one.
“We’re grateful that a number of potential cases have come forward following the call that we put out over the weekend.
“Our current vaccines have not yet been studied against this variant and we’re working to understand what impact it might have, but we do know that this variant has caused significant challenges in Brazil, so we’re doing all we can to stop the spread of this new variant in the UK, to analyse its effects and to develop an updated vaccine that works on all these variants of concern and protect the progress that we’ve made as a nation.”
Between 25% and 61% of people who have previously had Covid are susceptible to reinfection with the worrying P1 variant, research from the Brazilian city of Manaus has suggested.
A study on the P1 Brazilian variant among people living in Manaus found potentially high levels of reinfection, and that the variant was up to twice as transmissible as earlier strains in the city. British experts have cautioned that the study cannot be used to predict what may happen in the UK, and say it does not suggest that vaccines will not work against the variant.
It comes as the number of weekly registered coronavirus deaths in England and Wales has fallen by more than a quarter to the lowest level since the start of the year. Deaths involving Covid-19 among people aged 80 and over have fallen more steeply in recent weeks than those among younger age groups, the latest ONS figures show.
The Government said a further 343 people had died within 28 days of testing positive for Covid-19 as of yesterday, bringing the UK total to 123,296.
There were a further 6,391 lab-confirmed cases of the virus in the UK.
HUNDREDS of Nigerian girls abducted last week from a boarding school have been released, officials said.
Zamfara state governor Bello Matawalle announced that 279 girls have been freed.
Gunmen abducted the girls from the Government Girls Junior Secondary School in Jangebe in the north-western state on Friday, in the latest in a series of mass kidnappings of students in the west African nation. An Associated Press reporter saw hundreds of girls dressed in light blue hijabs and barefoot sitting at the state Government House office in Gusau.
After the meeting, the girls were escorted outside by officials and taken away in vans. They appeared calm and ranged in ages from 10 upwards.
“I enjoin all well-meaning Nigerians to rejoice with us as our daughters are now safe,” Mr Matawalle said in a post on Twitter.
At the time of the attack, one resident
told reporters that the gunmen also attacked a nearby military camp and checkpoint, preventing soldiers from responding to the mass abduction at the school.
Police and the military had since been carrying out joint operations to rescue the girls, whose abduction caused international outrage. Nigeria has seen several such attacks and kidnappings in recent years.
On Saturday, 24 students, six staff and eight relatives were released after being abducted on February 17 from the Government Science College Kagara in Niger state. In December, more than 300 boys from a secondary school in Kankara, in north-western Nigeria, were taken and later released. The government has said no ransom was paid for the students’ release.
The most notorious kidnapping was in April 2014, when 276 girls were abducted by jihadist rebels from Boko Haram from the secondary school in Chibok in Borno state. More than 100 of those girls are still missing. Boko Haram is opposed to western education and its fighters often target schools.
Other organised armed groups, locally called bandits, often abduct students for money. The government says large groups of armed men in Zamfara state are known to kidnap for money and to press for the release of their members held in jail.
Experts say if the kidnappings continue to go unpunished, they may continue.
Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari said last week the government would not “succumb to blackmail by bandits and criminals who target innocent school students in expectation of huge ransom payments”.
He called on state governments to review their policy of making payments, in money or vehicles, to bandits, saying such a policy has the potential to backfire.