A STRAIN of coronavirus has already reached Dorset according to new data – and could have been in the county in early December.

A variant of SARS-CoV-2, the virus which causes COVID-19, is thought to be driving increased transmission of the disease in parts of the UK.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson warned the public last week that this strain of Covid-19 is spreading rapidly, forcing London and South East to enter Tier 4 restrictions, while Matt Hancock feared that it could be why coronavirus is spreading faster in the country.

Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer, stated clearly that there was no evidence to date that this variant alters disease severity, either in terms of mortality or the seriousness of the cases of COVID-19 for those infected, however this is being confirmed.

The Covid-19 Genomics UK (COG-UK) consortium sampled cases around the UK and found the variant is also in the South West, Midlands and North of England – areas that are under Tier 2 and 3 restrictions.

Bournemouth Echo:

Their data, complied on an interactive map on Microreact, shows there is a single confirmed case of the coronavirus variant in Dorset. The approximate location given on the map is near Puddletown, between Dorchester and Bere Regis.

According to the map’s data, the case was recorded on Friday, December 4 – weeks before the strain was formally identified by medical figures and Government.

Elsewhere in the South West, cases of the coronavirus strain have been reported near Exeter, near Bridgwater, Bristol and Gloucester.

Doctor Jeffrey Barrett, lead Covid-19 statistical geneticist at COG-UK, warned there was a lag in the sequence data being sampled, so the most recent data was from the first week of December when England came out of the second national lockdown.

Dr Barrett said more up-to-date data from community testing also found one of the mutations of this variant is “present in very many different places in England”.

The news comes as Matt Hancock said cases of another new mutant coronavirus linked to South Africa had been found in the UK and placed travel restrictions on the country on Wednesday afternoon.

Bournemouth Echo:

The case rate in both Dorset Council and BCP Council areas has meanwhile nearly doubled according to fresh data from Public Health England.

In the Dorset Council area, the seven-day rolling rate has risen from 44.4 (168 cases) up to December 11 to 79.5 (301 cases) for up to December 18.

In the BCP Council region, the rolling seven-day rate of new cases of Covid-19 for the seven days up to December 18 was 154.6 cases per 100,000 people, with 611 positive tests in this period.

Across the seven days to December 11, the rate was 79.7, with 315 cases recorded.

The Government says data for the most recent four days (December 19 to December 22) has been excluded as it is incomplete and does not reflect the true number of cases.