'L' strain of Covid19 virus possibly responsible for higher death rate, slow discharge rate of Covid patients in Gujarat: State health department https://t.co/F7Xey2k52M pic.twitter.com/EQDayAQ7Cu

— DeshGujarat (@DeshGujarat) April 27, 2020

Gandhinagar: Gujarat government today said the slow discharge rate and higher death rate among Covid19 patients is possibly because of presence of ‘L’ strain of Covid19 virus present in the State.

Principal Secretary, Health, Dr. Jayanti Ravi in her video briefing today morning said there are two strains of Covid19 virus, ‘L’ strain and ‘S’ strain. While ‘S’ strain that has been seen present in Kerala and other states doesn’t not have intense impact, ‘L’ strain which has been seen in Gujarat is more virulent and that can be possibly linked to slow discharge and higher rate of deaths of Covid19 patients here.

She said Gujarat government arm GBRC (Gujarat Biotechnology Research Center) has come out with whole genome sequence of virus. She further said that samples of ‘L’ strain are to be collected from the patients including those who succumb to Covid19 infection.

Different strains of the virus

According to a study, ‘On the origin and continuing evolution of SARS-CoV-2’, published in National Science Review, the more aggressive L type of coronavirus was found more in the early stages of Wuhan outbreak, but its frequency decreased due to human intervention. “Population genetic analyses of 103 SARS-CoV-2 genomes indicated that these viruses evolved into two major types (designated L and S), that are well defined by two different SNPs that show nearly complete linkage across the viral strains sequenced to date. Although the L type (~70%) is more prevalent than the S type (~30%), the S type was found to be the ancestral version.”

“Whereas the L type was more prevalent in the early stages of the outbreak in Wuhan, the frequency of the L type decreased after early January 2020. Human intervention may have placed more severe selective pressure on the L type, which might be more aggressive and spread more quickly. On the other hand, the S type, which is evolutionarily older and less aggressive, might have increased in relative frequency due to relatively weaker selective pressure,” according to the study.

The Indian Express had reported Atul Patel, an infectious disease specialist at the Sterling hospital, as saying that the mortality rate was low in Kerala because most of the patients came from Dubai which has the milder S strain. He said, according to publication, that Kerala has more cases of the S strain, while the L strain was more common in Italy and France, causing rapid death. “In the US, the New York data is entirely different from the rest of its states. Patients from New York were all travellers from Europe.”

Madhya Prdaesh

On Sunday, doctors treating COVID-19 cases in Indore claimed that a more virulent strain may be wreaking havoc in the city, which has emerged as the coronavirus hotspot in Madhya Pradesh. They said samples from Indore, where COVID-19 has killed 57 people, will be sent to the Pune-based National Institute of Virology (NIV) to confirm their apprehensions of the strain being deadlier than in other parts of the country. “We have a feeling the strain is definitely more virulent in Indore belt. We have discussed this with the NIV and will be sending samples for them to compare by extraction of virus genome,” Dean of Government Mahatma Gandhi Memorial (MGM) Medical College Jyoti Bindal told PTI. “There are also other factors also for the high fatality rate, like patients turning up at the hospitals late,” she said.

Jitendra Bhargava, director of the state government-run School of Excellence in Pulmonary Medicine, also shared Bindal’s concern, saying the high mortality rate in Indore needs to be investigated through viral culture and RNA extraction.

DeshGujarat