HEALTH officials expect turnaround times for identifying coronavirus variants of concern to be sped up as part of a £13 million genomic sequencing centre to be set up in Scotland.

Nicola Sturgeon announced the investment at her daily coronavirus briefing – with the funding to be used to set up the new facility over the next year.

The First Minister said the genomic sequencing centre is “going to be really important in the next phase of the pandemic”, stressing it will help health officials to “identify new variants at as early a stage as possible”.

Once it reaches capacity, Ms Sturgeon said the new centre will "ultimately be capable of sequencing up to 1,000 samples every day”.

She added that it will help keep on top of variants of concern and ensure “they don’t get a foothold into the community and start to spread more widely”.

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The First Minister said the centre will also be used in future for any other pandemics or similar public health crises.

Scotland’s chief medical officer, Dr Gregor Smith said he expects the fully ramped up sequencing centre to be able to shorten turnaround times from when people receive a positive test to when variants of concern are identified – a crucial element on the Test and Protect scheme.

He said: “Over time, what I expect is that with that increased capacity, we will actually see a much shorter turnaround time in terms of how we get those results.

“At the moment, it’s a fairly complex process the sequencing goes through across a number of different sectors. By doing this and becoming much more sustainable within Scotland itself, we’ll be able to shorten that period in some respects.”

Dr Smith that that currently “where there’s an urgency for those type of results”, the turnaround can be just a few days.

He added: “Even in the last three to four weeks, there’s been further changes in some of the processes that have been deployed just to make sure that the two to three weeks timescales that it was taking for your standard genomic sequencing, have been shortened slightly as well.

“A lot of it boils down to what is the urgency of need or the information and where there is a real desire to get that information quickly, we can generally do that within a few days.”

The First Minister was asked whether once the Scottish sequencing system reaches its capacity, will it be able to examine all daily cases of Covid-19.

She said: “If we were under 1,000 cases a day when we get this operating at a capacity, we’d have capacity to do that.

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“I’m not sure that clinical scientific choice would be to genomic sequence absolutely every case.”

Dr Smith stressed the importance of genomic sequencing, insisting it has “allowed us to understand both the behaviour of the virus and also the changing nature of the virus over time”.

He added: “I would like to get to the stage where infections are so low that we can track all the viruses so we can understand fully and make sure there’s that degree of surveillance over the development of this virus.”