City doctor Tove Røsstad said earlier last week and warned that a more contagious virus may be circulating in Trondheim. Therefore, on Friday, samples of the virus were sent from St. Olaf for analysis at the National Institute of Public Health.
During the first sequencing of the samples, the analysis showed that the virus variant that could be associated with this outbreak was a variant they did not know before.
A more contagious variety
Over the weekend, another six people who could be linked to the ongoing epidemic were diagnosed with an infection. On Monday, the outbreak of the epidemic therefore numbers about 35 people, and several hundred people were quarantined. The city council expects the outbreak to escalate, especially as quarantined individuals are tested.
But it's a new type that FHI has not had in its archives until now. We experience that this the virus behaves differently. At the same time, it is possible that nothing like this has been diagnosed in Trondheim before, says Røsstad.
It spreads quickly
The municipality became suspicious last week after an outbreak involving a nightclub, among other things. The city grew quickly as a workplace and student community.
The virus seems more contagious, but we haven't seen it cause any more serious disease. It must also be said that mostly people in their XNUMXs are infected, but we also have people in their XNUMXs. At the time of diagnosis, they all had relatively mild symptoms, says Røsstad.
Last week, the FHI said they found a mutated version of the coronavirus that had not been seen before in Norway. The discovery was made in the wake of the outbreak in the much-discussed 'infection bus' in which many retirees traveling in Norway became infected, which in turn led passengers to spread the infection further to the places they visited.
