South Africa detects new Covid variant C.1.2

COVID-19 variant C.1.2 was first identified in May 2021 during the third wave of COVID in South Africa. The variant has evolved from C.1, one of the lineages that dominated the first wave of SARS-CoV-2 infections in the country and was last detected in January 2021.

Johannesburg: South Africa has identified a potential variant of interest (VOI) of COVID-19 that is assigned to the PANGO lineage C.1.2. C.1.2 was first identified in May 2021 during the third wave of COVID in the country, said researchers from the country's National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD) and the KwaZulu-Natal Research Innovation and Sequencing Platform. It has since been detected across the majority of the provinces in South Africa and in seven other countries spanning Africa, Europe, Asia and Oceania, the researchers reported in the study that is yet to be peer-reviewed and is posted on pre-print server medRxiv.