There are now over 30 variant cases reported in Niagara.
Niagara's Acting Medical Officer of Health Dr. Mustafa Hirji updating the number of variant cases this afternoon, saying 33 cases are now being investigated.
Hirji believes we are seeing cases of the the B.1.1.7 variant, formerly known as the “U.K. variant” in Niagara.
Hirji says the number is growing quite quickly, and while most are linked to travel to the GTA, some cases are not linked to travel outside the region.
He joined us earlier today, when only 17 variants were under investigation:
"We don't know which ones are here yet. Unfortunately it's quite an involved process of basically sequencing the entire genome of the nuclear material of a virus to figure out which of the variants it is. Our guess is the B117 variant which is the UK one since it's been 95 percent of the ones found in Ontario but it will probably be another week or two before we have a firm identification." He says. "What we do know though is that the screening test is very close to being 100 percent accurate and as of Friday we were up to 17 screened positive for the variants. You may remember about a week earlier we were only at about 6 so that number is growing quite quickly."
He says the best thing we can do to limit spread of the variants is limit travel as vaccination efforts continue.