Niagara Region Public Health is reporting 17 cases of COVID-19 variants in the region.
Niagara's Acting Medical Officer of Health Dr. Mustafa Hirji says the number is growing quite quickly.
"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."
Hirji says provincially about 20 percent of COVID-19 cases are now being linked to the variant strains.
He says the best thing we can do to limit spread of the variants is limit travel as vaccination efforts continue.
As Niagara enters into the Red level of the province's restriction system today, Hirji is expressing his concern with the rise in variant cases.