By JULIA MARI ORNEDO, GMA News
Published March 10, 2021 6:00pm
Two experts on Wednesday clarified that a coronavirus lineage is different from a variant after confusion followed the announcement of the Quezon City government that the more transmissible Brazil variant had been detected in the country.
The Quezon City Epidemiology and Surveillance Unit later on retracted the pronouncement regarding the Brazil variant.
Dr. Eva Cutiongco-dela Paz of the University of the Philippines National Institutes of Health explained that viruses have subtypes that can be put into larger groupings called “lineages.”
Variants, meanwhile, are “groups of viruses that share the same set of distinctive or signature mutations.”