EFE.- Guatemala identified this Thursday the first two positive cases of the Mu variant of covid-19 in two female patients, aged 19 and 25, the National Health Laboratory assured.
Both patients had no travel report or vaccination history and reside in the central department of Guatemala, where the capital, Guatemala City, is located, the entity dependent on the Ministry of Public Health and Social Assistance expanded.
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“The National Health Laboratory announced this Thursday through the sequencing report SEQ-08-09-2021 the arrival of the variant of interest B.1.621, or better known as Mu,” the institution specified in reference to the strain originally identified in Colombia in January 2021 and considered by the World Health Organization (WHO) as an “emerging health risk due to its significant transmission”.
Guatemala has previously reported the delta, gamma and lambda variants of covid-19, which has also registered “four variants of concern and four more of interest,” according to the National Laboratory.
The Central American country added 88 new deaths from Sars-CoV-2 on Thursday, the highest figure in a single day since the start of the pandemic in March 2020.
In total, taking into account the most recent deaths detected, Guatemala accumulates 12,098 deaths due to the disease, thus taking 479,376 infections detected by the health portfolio.
According to experts and various entities, Guatemala is in the worst moment since the beginning of the pandemic due to the multiplication of cases and deaths, especially since the confirmation in August of the appearance of the delta variant in the territory.
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Since the Minister of Health, Amelia Flores, affirmed on June 14 that the Central American nation was going through the third wave of the disease, the average daily deaths went from 20 deaths every 24 hours to 40 deaths a day, with peaks of up to 70 new deaths in a single day.
Vaccination in Guatemala is one of the lowest in Latin America since only 1.3 million of its 16.3 million inhabitants have received the complete scheme (two doses) to be immunized against covid-19.
According to the Ministry of Health, 3.3 million people have been vaccinated on at least one occasion while waiting to complete their schedule with the second dose.