both estimating similar increased rates of transmission (50-80%) with this new UK variant.
“In fact the use of the SGTF (S-gene target failure) by the Imperial College analysis likely underestimates the number of POS cases due to the new variant, as some labs (like ours) do not use any COVID-19 assays that target the S gene – exactly because we anticipated S gene mutations evolving over the course of the pandemic. So we are likely detecting new UK variant cases without identifying them as such (except via retrospective sequencing later) as we will not see this SGTF effect with our assays. There may be other labs like ours not using such S-gene target assays that may be underestimating this variant frequency also.