A nasopharyngeal PCR test carried out at Roissy. (drawing) – BERTRAND GUAY / AFP
Twenty-nine additional cases of the Delta variant, identified for the first time in India in April, have been identified in the Landes since the announcement on Wednesday of the first two cases, said the prefecture and the Regional Health Agency (ARS) in a statement. To these 31 proven cases, the ARS adds “about twenty others” on the basis of an estimate because “the positive cases for Covid-19 did not all give rise to the use of the sequencing method allowing to ‘identify the variant’ Delta.
These some fifty cases in total, proven or “estimated”, can be “grouped together in about fifteen sources of contamination”, especially family, explains the ARS, “subject to the results of investigations still underway to cross data and tracing the chains of contamination ”. The 31 proven cases concern six communities of municipalities, adds the ARS in its press release published Friday evening.
The worrying epidemiological situation in the Landes
The health authorities announced on Wednesday that the Delta variant, still not very present in the territory, had been spotted in a family in the agglomeration of Dax without it having been linked to India or Great Britain . They had stepped up screening and sequencing operations. The government had also expressed concern about the increase in the prevalence of Covid-19 in part of the country, in particular in Occitanie and New Aquitaine, a region which includes the Landes.
According to the ARS, the “epidemiological situation is unfavorable” in this department which displays an incidence rate of 95.6 per 100,000 inhabitants, “higher than the national rate” and increasing “by 35% in less than three weeks”. If 43.6% of Landais received a first dose of vaccine according to the press release, the prefecture and the ARS call on the population to “maintain barrier gestures” and explain that “the limitation of groups to 10 people on the public highway is still in force ”.