AMMAN —
Biolab Medical Laboratory announced the first two confirmed cases in Jordan and the Arab world
of the sub-variant of Omicron (BA.2), which is known as the "hidden
variant" due to the inability of traditional PCR tests to distinguish
between it and the Delta variant, according to Ad-Dustour News.
اضافة اعلان
Head of the COVID-19 Sequencing Project Issa Abu-Dayyeh revealed
that the two discovered cases of the BA.2 variant were suspected after
conducting specialized PCR tests on positive samples collected from arriving
travelers at Queen Alia International Airport.
Through a genetic sequence test, the lab was able to indicate that
the two BA.2 cases belong to travelers coming from abroad, one from India, and
the other from the Philippines.
Dayyeh indicated that the research
team of Biolab Medical Laboratory worked in record time to upload the genetic
codes of the two cases of BA.2 to the
Global Initiative on Sharing All Influenza Data (GISAID) for the purpose of sharing it with specialists around
the world.
The chief executive officer and the founder of Biolab, Amid
Abdelnour, stressed the important role the research team played in proving
throughout the pandemic that it is capable of early detection of coronavirus
variants, decoding their genetic codes, analyzing their data, and publishing
them on GISAID with speed and efficiency comparable to many developed countries
of the world.
Abdelnour added that
Biolab will continue to cooperate with various parties to expand the GISAID
database in order to help control the spread of the virus in the coming period.
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