The government and private sector have collaborated to develop a reagent for a PCR test that can detect the omicron COVID-19 variant.

Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency(KDCA) Commissioner Jeong Eun-kyeong said on Friday that the reagent will reduce the current three to five days before confirmation through genome sequencing to three to four hours.

It will be distributed to municipal governments nationwide by Wednesday, so that they can begin to utilize it in PCR analysis from Thursday. 

According to the KDCA, the analysis system, which already detects the alpha, beta, gamma and delta variants, will be the first in the world to differentiate five major variants at once.