Israeli scientists have developed a rapid cost-effective test that identifies two of the mutated COVID-19 strains, Ben Gurion University (BGU) in southern Israel said.

The current standard for coronavirus variants testing is sequencing the entire virus genome, which is expensive and time-consuming, Xinhua news agency reported.

The new test, however, reduces the time needed to determine whether an infection is caused by a variant from days to hours, BGU said in a statement on Tuesday.

In their study, published on the preprint server MedRxiv, a team of BGU researchers has developed the rapid test based on the gene deletion that differentiates the variants from the original SARS-CoV-2 strain.

The team successfully tried their test on samples taken from the sewage system in the southern city of Beer Sheva.