Twelve individuals have contracted a currently unknown strain of the coronavirus. Patient Zero is a Cameroonian returning from his country to the city of Marseille in southern France. Experts suspect that Patient Zero transmitted the virus from Cameroon, a country located in Central Africa. The new variant was detected by experts at the University Hospital of Marseille on December 9 and is temporarily named B.1.640.2. In a preliminary study released on December 29, health experts from the French government reported identifying 46 mutations of this new form of the virus. This variant appears to be more contagious than the original coronavirus.
The identification of this new variant comes as the Omicron variant continues to spread worldwide. In an attempt to explain the rapid spread of Omicron, a Danish study published last week indicated that the new variant of the coronavirus is better at evading the immunity of vaccinated individuals compared to the Delta variant. The study, which involved nearly 12,000 households in Denmark in mid-December, concluded that Omicron is between 2.7 and 3.7 times more infectious than the Delta variant among vaccinated Danes. The research conducted by scholars at the University of Copenhagen's Statistics Institute noted that Omicron spreads faster primarily because it is better at evading vaccine-acquired immunity.
