Rapid spread of a new variant of coronavirus has been claimed to be responsible for elevated restrictions in part of UK (mainly south of England) which in turn resulted in travel bans to the UK from a number of countries including EU and Turkey.
Understandably this has caused a strong wave of concern about the future of pandemic when good news of vaccination had started to provide hopes of returning back to “normal”.
World Health Organisation (WHO) issued a statement on December 21, explaining that investigations are currently ongoing to understand the correlation between the suspected mutation (namely SARS-CoV-2 VUI 202012/01) and the severity of symptoms, mortality rate, antibody response or vaccine efficacy.
We are well aware the fact that accuracy, inclusivity and specificity of our kits is extremely important in COVID-19 diagnosis and help combat the pandemic. Thus, our R&D team has been routinely performing design reviews of the sequence alignments also employing the newly submitted sequences to National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) and Global Initiative on Sharing Avian Influenza Data (GISAID) databases in order to monitor the inclusivity of our assays, since February 2020, every 15 days.
Ability of all the Bosphore Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV/SARS-CoV-2) Detection Kits to detect 100% of all available circulating SARS-CoV-2 strains including all VUI 202012/01 mutants, has been confirmed to detect all of the subtypes of SARS-CoV-2 including all VUI mutants.
We will continue to ensure that our COVID testing kits can detect all the SARS-CoV-2 strains, by reviewing periodically in order to check against all new strains and mutations.
