In a letter to ministers, the EU says that sequencing must be stepped up.
BRUSSELS, Nov 30 - The European Union's health commissioner has urged governments to increase efforts to detect coronaviruses, as some countries lag behind even as the new Omicron variant is detected around the bloc.
The variant that was first found in southern Africa has now been identified in several European countries, but it is hard to track its spread as different countries don't carry out sufficient genome sequencing of positive samples.
Stella Kyriakides, health ministers of the 27 EU countries, said that certain member states lag behind in terms of this crucial dimension.
She urged all member states to do more.
Genomic sequencing decodes genes in the SARS-CoV-2 genome to tell scientists which variant might be present, allowing them to learn more about the virus.
Kyriakides did not identify the laggards, but data from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control ECDC shows that seven EU countries did not sequence at a sufficient level in the first half of November. Belgium, the first European country to detect the Omicron variant, identified the case by sequencing just 3% of positive tests, and has a capacity of about 10%, in line with many other EU states, the virologist who found the variant there, Marc Van Ranst, told Reuters.
In the Nov. 29 letter, Kyriakides urged ministers to vaccinate faster and offer boosters urgently.
She wrote that the Delta variant may experience more or additional pressures because of the appearance of the Omicron variant, a challenge that has already been faced with a challenging winter due to the high transmissibility of the Delta variant.
Kyriakides encouraged national authorities to test more people with molecular and rapid tests. Testing identifies infected individuals and is the first step before sequencing.
She added that the monitoring of waste water has proven to be an effective tool for key insights, but needs to be leveraged in the diagnostic effort.
The World Health Organization WHO said that widely available tests are able to detect individuals infected with any variant, including Omicron. It has so far recommended only the TaqPath test produced by U.S. firm Thermo Fisher as a proxy.
That test can identify the mutation that is usually linked to Omicron, called the S gene dropout. That allows for targeting a limited number of samples for sequencing, which is still necessary to ascertain if it is Omicron, because the S gene dropout occurs also in other variants.
The Belgian lab that detected the Omicron variant used a Thermo Fisher testing machine, but it is not clear how widespread it is in Europe. The company didn't say how many tests it had sold and how many countries in Europe, citing its policy not to disclose customer data.