Genotyping of Sars-CoV-2 variants in a South East Sicilian population

Covid-19 is a pandemic that affected the world for 3 years. The infectious agent was identified as a virus and was named as SARS-CoV-2 by The International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses. Its rapid spreading led the World Health Organization to declare the pandemic on the the 11th March 2020. From that moment on, life in the whole world underwent radical changes, given by imposition of mask use, lockdowns, strict hygiene rules and social distance, and blanket screening to detect contagions. The 5th May 2023 the WHO the end of the Covid-19 global emergency. Sars-CoV-2 is a RNA respiratory virus that belongs to the Coronaviridae family. It’s a Beta Coronavirus and is composed by four structural proteins: spike (S), membrane (M), envelope (E) and nucleocapsid (N). Sars-CoV-2 genome is composed by a single-stranded positive-sense RNA and is ~29.9 Kb in size. Like all the viruses, replication is not a perfect mechanism and the polymerase does lots of errors that became mutations. The rate of mutations grew up until creating new variants of the virus. The WHO identified 5 VOC (that are more dangerous and diffused): ALPHA, BETA, GAMMA, DELTA and OMICRON with its derivates (from BA.1 to BA.5 and the Variant Soup). There are also some VOI, like LAMBDA or MU, that have a little diffusion across the world. The genotyping of the variants in all the positive samples became a good instrument for monitoring the development of the virus during these three years. In this work was performed a genotyping of SARS-CoV-2 variants in a cohort of patients who tested positive to molecular assay for virus detection. An assessment of the evolution of variants and their respective symptoms was then carried out over the period from 2020 to 2023, when the end of the pandemic was declared.