Mystery person infected with Brazilian strain of coronavirus found in Croydon

Matt Hancock told a Downing Street press briefing he was ‘delighted’ the case has been found
Tammy Hughes5 March 2021

The mystery person who tested positive for the highly-transmissible Brazilian strain of coronavirus has been found in Croydon after a huge search.

Health secretary Matt Hancock told a Downing Street briefing on Friday that the person in question “stayed at home” and there was no evidence of “onward transmission”.

“We’ve successfully identified the person in question,” he said.

“The best evidence is that this person in question stayed at home and there’s no sign that there’s been any onward transmission,” he said, adding testing in the area had been increased as a precaution.

Mr Hancock said he was “delighted” the missing person has been found.

Six cases of the P1 variant, first identified in the Brazilian city of Manaus, have now been identified – three in Scotland and three in England

A public appeal was made for one of those in England to come forward after they took a test in February but left no contact details.

Earlier this week Mr Hancock said the search had narrowed to around 300 households southern England.

Dr Susan Hopkins, Covid-19 strategic response director at Public Health England, told Friday’s briefing that the person lived in a household that had recently returned from Brazil.

She set out how they had been tracked down by cross referencing testing and postal data to produce a narrowed down list of possible candidates, who were then contacted by tracing teams.

A team of 40 people, armed with just a single bar code and limited test data, spent days using "dogged determination" to track down the mystery person infected with the Manaus coronavirus variant.

She explained that the unnamed person had attempted to register his test online, but "had failed to do so effectively".

Dr Hopkins continued: "Specialist teams from NHS Test and Trace and Public Health England immediately launched an investigation to identify the individual concerned.

"An incident team of 40 people from across the system made up of laboratories, logistics, data analytic experts was mobilised to trace the individual.

"The team began with very little information."

She said, on Sunday morning, they were only in possession of a single barcode and the date and time that the test was processed at the Cambridge Lighthouse laboratory.

The discovery, via reading the test barcode, that the sample had arrived at the Cambridge Lighthouse through the DHL service for home delivery helped narrow it down to two regions made up of 10,000 possible households.

Even though NHS Test and Trace delivers "many thousands" of kits a week, the team were able to compare the test in question to others in the system and work "backwards" from when it arrived in the laboratory, to which testing hub it had come from and through the postal service.

Their intelligence was then "overlaid with the geographical spread to look for the correlation of sequential barcodes", Dr Hopkins said.

Once the region and "time window" for the test were combined, experts tracked down "every single" distribution centre to filter down options.

These were narrowed to 379 households with "enhanced contact tracing" then kicking-in, with call handlers phoning and emailing those who could have received a test in that time interval.

This scaled it down to 27 individuals who received further calls and text messages.

Dr Hopkins said: "On Wednesday at 3pm, an individual phoned the 119 service.

"They were able to give the missing barcode number that they had held securely for the whole time.

"This individual has been interviewed extensively and lives within a household that had recently returned from Brazil and all had quarantined at home.

"Further precautionary testing will occur in the neighbourhood and we have already started testing all of the samples from the neighbourhood through whole genome sequencing to ensure there is no further distribution of cases in the community."

She added: "This is a testament to the NHS Test and Trace teams, the call handlers and the Public Health England health protection team working together to find an individual and prevent further transmission."

Mr Hancock also hailed the "brilliant" team who had been "working so hard over the past week".

Authorities are concerned about the Brazilian strain of coronavirus, which was first detected in the city of Manaus because they fear it may prove more resistant to vaccines.

The P.1 variant has been detected in more than 25 countries including Belgium, Sweden and the UK.

Research released this week found that the strain is up to twice as transmissible as some others.

However, a source told Reuters news agency that the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine was effective on the Manaus strain.

The anonymous source said preliminary data from a University of Oxford study reportedly shows that the jab doesn’t need to be modified to protect against the strain.

They said the full results of the study are expected to be released soon - possibly later this month.

Brazil is currently facing a deadly second wave of the coronavirus, leaving its health system in crisis.

More than 260,000 people have died with Covid-19, Brazil’s health ministry says, making this the second-highest pandemic death toll in the world behind the United States

On Thursday, another 1,699 deaths were added to that tally, a slight decrease on Wednesday’s record 1,910.

Meanwhile, a further 75,102 cases of coronavirus were reported, making it the second-highest daily rise on record.

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