The first confirmed case in the United States of the highly contagious Covid-19 variant that made its debut in the United Kingdom is a member of the Colorado National Guard deployed to a nursing home that handles a coronavirus outbreak , government officials unveiled Wednesday.
A second member of the six-person National Guard contingent sent to the Good Samaritan Society facility in the city of Simla is also suspected of having contracted the variant, Dr. Rachel Herlihy, an epidemiologist in Colorado, said during a virtual update.
“We have one confirmed and one possible case of the variant in the state,” she said. “And we deployed a team to the facility.”
They were part of a contingent of six members of the National Guard who arrived at the facility about 45 miles northeast of Colorado Springs on Dec. 23, Herlihy said. Their infections were discovered after they were tested on Christmas Eve.
“In Simla, they were deployed to help deal with staff shortages following an outbreak that affected 100 percent of the facility’s residents,” said Colorado Government Jared Polis.
Now both patients, who do not live in Simla, are in isolation as contact detectives try to determine where, when and how they were infected with the variant, Herlihy said.
No patient, both of whom were identified earlier than men by Dwayne Smith, director of health care at Elbert County, has a recent history of traveling outside the country, Herlihy said.
In other coronavirus news:
- The Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed blamed everything, from blizzards to general inexperience for the slower-than-expected introduction of Covid-19 vaccines.
- A new Covid-19 vaccine, manufactured by British drugmaker AstraZeneca in collaboration with the University of Oxford, has received regulatory approval in the UK.
- Americans in Wuhan, the Chinese city where the first Covid-19 cases were detected, told NBC News that they are more concerned about how the pandemic is spreading in the US at home.
- A reveler at a New York City Republican holiday that became infamous after a viral video in which maskless partygoers danced in a conga line came up with a case of Covid-19. “I was not on the conga line. I ate alone,” James Trent, chairman of the affiliated Queens Village Republican Club, told The Queens Daily Eagle. “I do not know how I got it.
- Two mega-churches in New Mexico have been fined for violating the state’s pandemic protocols.
- Stay-at-home orders have expanded in California amid an increase in new coronavirus cases and deaths.
- Most Hollywood productions will be suspended until mid-January due to the increase in Covid-19 cases in Los Angeles, the trade union for professional film and television actors told its members.
- One of America’s favorite losers, actress Dawn Wells, who played Mary Ann in the 60-year-old sitcom “Gilligan’s Island,” has died at Covid-19, her spokeswoman said. She was 82.
Meanwhile, the government of California, Gavin Newsom, announced on Wednesday that the Covid-19 variant has been detected somewhere in Southern California.
The mutation detected in Colorado and California has also been identified in more than a dozen countries, including France, Denmark, Japan, South Korea and Canada.
But because there are no widespread attempts in the US to perform regular genome sequencing of samples from across the country, it is likely that the variant is already spreading here, said dr. Diane Griffin, a professor of molecular microbiology and immunology at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School. of public health, told NBC News on Tuesday.
The silver lining? The Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca vaccines for Covid-19 should be effective against the new variant.
“Our real assumption from all the scientists is that the vaccine response should be sufficient for this virus,” Patrick Vallance, the UK’s chief scientific adviser, said earlier this month.
Nearly 19.7 million cases of Covid-19 have been recorded since the onset of the pandemic in the US and the virus has claimed more than 341,000 lives, according to the latest NBC News.
The Good Samaritan Society facility in Simla, formerly a local hospital and home to about 25 residents, was in the midst of an outbreak of Covid-19 cases, and so far there have been two confirmed coronavirus deaths, ‘ a 93-year-old man and an 88-year-old woman, officials said.
The facility is primarily available to people from the eastern plains of Colorado and peaked in 2009 in a survey by the US News & World Report among 15,500 of the country’s nursing homes.
But in May, state health department inspectors noted that the facility ‘could not set up and maintain an infection control program, even though it considered the potential harm to residents to be minimal.
In an unrelated case in November, the facility and its administrators were charged in a civil case with negligence in connection with the death of a 74-year-old resident who wandered into her car seat and overturned in a nearby drainage ditch.
