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How quickly are the new, worrying Sars-CoV-2 variants spreading in Germany?
The Robert Koch Institute is now dedicating a report to this question for the first time, which appeared on Friday.
According to this, all three variants that are currently being viewed with concern - the British B.1.1.7, the South African B.1.351 and the Brazilian P.1 - have already been detected in Germany, the British variant being particularly common.
As of January 31, the RKI had received 168 records of B.1.1.7 in Germany.
The cases come from 13 federal states, only Saxony-Anhalt, Saarland and Rhineland-Palatinate have so far not discovered any suspicious samples.
The South African mutant has been detected 27 times, the cases come from seven federal states (Baden-Württemberg, Bavaria, Hamburg, Hesse, North Rhine-Westphalia, Saxony-Anhalt and Saxony).
Overall, the RKI estimated the proportion of B.1.1.7 in positive PCR tests in the last week of January to be around 5.8 percent.
The assessment is based on the subsequent analysis of over 30,000 positive Sars-CoV-2 samples.
This result is supported by the results of genome sequencing, in which the proportion of B.1.1.7 was 5.73 percent.
In Germany, however, there is currently so little sequencing that no reliable conclusions can be drawn from the limited amount of data available.
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In any case, according to the RKI, it can be determined that the proportion of B.1.1.7 infections in the population is also increasing in Germany.
As an example of this, the RKI also cites the results of university laboratories which, in the subsequent analysis of 1,130 positive samples from December 2020, only discovered the critical mutation in one.
In the first three calendar weeks of January, however, B.1.1.7 (1.9 percent) and eight B.1.351 (0.4 percent) were detected 37 times among 1964 samples.
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