Bordeaux (AFP)

An ephemeral vaccination center will open on Wednesday in the Bordeaux district where a cluster of fifty positive cases for a "worrying" variant was discovered, the director for the Gironde of the regional agency told AFP on Sunday. Health (ARS).

Some 19,000 additional doses of Pfizer and Moderna have been released in order to rapidly vaccinate the entire major population of the district of Bacalan, in the north of the city, from which a massive screening operation was launched Friday as soon as the announcement by the ARS Nouvelle-Aquitaine of this cluster.

Fifty people have tested positive for a variant "already known but very rare" and classified as "worrying" by Public Health France.

"The idea, explained to AFP Benédicte Motte, director of the ARS in Gironde, is to take advantage of the screening operation in progress, which has already concerned around 500 people between Friday and Saturday but whose first results are not yet known, to tell people who test negative to get vaccinated quickly ".

"We will have three vectors at our disposal," she added. The ephemeral center in Bacalan which will be open on Wednesday, the already existing vaccination centers of Bordeaux-Lac (a mega-center, note), Mérignac and Bouscat whose capacities will be + boosted +, and finally 17 pharmacies in the Bordeaux-Maritime district (including Bacalan and its 8,000 inhabitants) which will receive doses of Moderna ".

A meeting will take place Tuesday morning between health authorities, city and metropolis to determine the location of the ephemeral center, the idea being "to use an existing health center" according to Ms. Motte.

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"Our job is to identify as many cases as possible and to break the chains of contamination," she summarized.

"We are not starting from scratch because the vaccination rate in Gironde is high: 82% among people over 65 and 56% among over 50 years."

Called VOC 20I / 484Q, this variant is of English strain, with one mutation.

It is for the first time at the origin of such an important cluster.

Positive people, mostly young children and parents of young children attending the same school, have not been hospitalized and do not present serious forms, according to the ARS.

This variant "does not seem different from the types of Covid-19 to which we are used, assures Ms. Motte. Its only originality, according to first intuitions, is that it would be more transmissible than the others".

The Charles-Martin school in Bacalan, closed on May 17 after the first cases detected (10 positive students in total), will reopen its doors on Tuesday, according to its director Vincent Maurin, also deputy mayor (PC) of Bordeaux- Maritime.

© 2021 AFP