New coronavirus strain found in Finland: difficult to detect yet different from all others

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – A Finnish laboratory has detected a new coronavirus strain, which has been dubbed Fin-796H and was found in the south of the country. A joint study by Vita Laboratories and the University of Helsinki’s Institute of Biotechnology has shown that this new strain can’t be detected by all PCR tests approved by the World Health Organization (WHO), according to an official statement.

“Vita Laboratoriot Oy and the Institute of Biotechnology at the University of Helsinki have detected a previously unknown variant of the coronavirus in a sample from southern Finland. Mutations in this variant make it difficult to detect in at least one of the WHO-recommended PCR tests. This discovery could have a significant impact on determining the spread of the disease,” said the Vita laboratory.

According to the study, Fin-796H is quite different from all of the previously found strains in South Africa and the United Kingdom. “Its inheritance has the same features as the previously widespread variants in the world, but it does not appear to belong to the lineage of any of the previously known variants,” the statement reads.

The researchers do not know where this mutation developed and believe that this might have happened outside Finland because the country has significantly lower number of Covid-19 cases. It also remains unclear how effective vaccines will be against the new strain of coronavirus.

The discovery of the coronavirus mutation in Finland has perplexed scientists because of the nation’s efficient work in limiting covid deaths. The 5.5 million-inhabitants country has reported only 725 deaths from the disease, according to Johns Hopkins University.

By last Thursday, Finland had reported 450 cases of coronavirus variants, according to the country’s infectious disease control center, THL. Among these, the majority – 427 – were of the British variant, 22 of the South African, and 1 of the Brazilian.

But according to University of Turku virology professor Ilkka Julkunen, the information should not create panic. “I would not be too worried yet because we have no clear information that this new strain would be more easily transmitted or that it would affect the immune protection provided to people who have already had the virus or been administered a vaccine,” Julkunen said in an interview with the New York Daily News.

Petri Auvinen, director of research at the University of Helsinki’s Institute of Biotechnology said that the discovery of new variants of the coronavirus was inevitable. “However, the newly discovered strain differs from previous ones because it does not genetically resemble any other known variant,” Auvinen noted to the same newspaper.