A new and potentially more contagious strain of Covid-19 identified in Britain has not yet appeared in Bermuda, a top doctor said last night.

Wesley Miller, the chief of staff at the Bermuda Hospitals Board, said there was no “indication at this point” that the Delta Plus variant had arrived on the island.

He said there was “not, on a clinical basis, a suspicion that there is some more serious variant at play at present”.

Testing for variants of the coronavirus stopped over the latest outbreak because of the high volume of cases and testing.

But Dr Miller said: “As we get smaller numbers, it will again be possible to have it.”

The Government said last year a figure of 70 per cent vaccination was the island’s goal to hit herd immunity against Covid-19.

Herd immunity is where a virus is no longer able to infect enough people to circulate freely.

Dr Miller said 70 per cent would have been “a reasonable figure” if the coronavirus had remained the same strain.

He added: “When the figure of 70 per cent came, it was mainly in relation to the Alpha variant, the English variant.

“The Delta variant, which was identified in India, is a mutation.”

Dr Miller warned that the emergence of variants would require a higher level of immunity to prevent a virus from continuing to spread.

He said: “You are dealing with a moving target in terms of the virus itself as it undergoes mutation – it changes.”