The identification of a new coronavirus variant in the east German city of Halle this week has prompted a rebuttal from Luxembourg health authorities. Bernd Wiegand, the mayor of Halle, said that a hospital employee had contracted the new strain. “This variant, known as Norwegian, or Luxembourgish, also has an extremely high infection rate,” the mayor said, according to a report in newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, via the Deutsche Presse Agentur.

But director of health Dr Jean-Claude Schmit said that the new variant, which was reported first in Texas, did not have any specific thing to do with Luxembourg.

Luxembourg specialist in Infectious disease epidemiology Joël Mossong tweeted on Friday that he did not understand why the dpa report associated the new strain with Luxembourg or Norway.

Confusion seems to have arisen with the naming of the variant, which German media reported as being B.1.1.6. In fact, the variant discovered in the Halle patient was the B.1.160 strain, according to the German city's health authority. Other media, including Business World, has also picked up on the B.1.1.6 nomenclature and said that the “variant reportedly originated in Luxembourg in late 2020 and it is not yet known if the strain causes more severe disease.”

But on Friday the LNS national health laboratory had also issued a statement saying it had “received confirmation from authorities in Germany that the variant in question, and discussed in the newspapers, belongs to B.1.160 and not B.1.16.” It reiterated that the B.1.16. lineage is regarded as emanating from the US, and Texas in particular, and said that “no sequence is registered that corresponds to a Luxembourgish-Norwegian variant in the official international database PANGO lineages”

Indeed, the B.1.160 variant is the most common in patients testing positive for SARS-CoV-2 in the grand duchy, accounting for 44,1% of recorded infections. The B.1.1.7 variant, which some media have labelled the British variant, accounts for 16,1% of reported cases, with a B1 mutation of the B.1.1.7 variant the third most frequent at 8.6%.