To date, health experts have identified at least three variants of the coronavirus identified by the countries from which they appear to be: the United Kingdom, South Africa and Brazil.
Fauci, the director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Disease, told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that health experts in South Africa have seen the variant there have such a high re-infection rate that it appears people are not protecting the previous infection .
Although current vaccines do not offer the same protection against the variants, they can be protected against serious diseases, including hospitalization and death, Fauci said. They can also prevent variants from becoming more prevalent.
“Viruses cannot mutate if they do not repeat. And if you stop their replication by vaccinating widely and not giving the virus an open playing field to continue responding to the pressure you put on it, you will have no mutations. do not get, “Fauci said in a virtual news release with the White House Covid-19 response team.
“You need to be vaccinated if it is available in the country as quickly and as quickly as possible.”
More transferable variants spread across the US
The variant identified in the UK has already made its way to several US states.
On Monday, the Iowa Department of Health said three cases had been identified. Officials contacted those infected to monitor their health and notify the people with whom they were in close contact.
“State and local public health officials are conducting additional epidemiological investigations to gather more information about illness, travel history and possible exposure,” IDPH spokeswoman Sarah Ekstrand told CNN.
Georgia officials have identified 19 cases in the Atlanta metro area, the health department said Monday. The cases are among people aged 15 to 61 years.
South Carolina’s first known case of the variant was identified in an adult from the Lowcountry region who traveled internationally, the agency said in a statement Saturday.
And although Covid-19 cases have been steadily declining in Colorado, the state has identified 13 cases of the British strain, dr. Colorado epidemiologist Rachel Herlihy told reporters during a Zoom press conference.
The state is working “hard” to make the distribution of a vaccine against the virus fair and transparent, said Brigadier General Scott Sherman of the Colorado National Guard.
32 million vaccine doses administered in the US.
The distribution and administration of vaccines has been slow, but officials hope to accelerate the pace of getting doses to states and people’s arms to get their arms around the pandemic and the increasing variants.
To date, more than 32 million doses of Covid-19 vaccine have been administered in the United States, with 26 million people receiving at least one dose and nearly 6 million being fully vaccinated, according to data released Monday by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. . and prevention.
Both Michigan and North Carolina have administered more than a million vaccine doses, officials said.
“Reaching this milestone is good news for our families, frontline workers and small business owners, but there is more work to be done,” said Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. “My government is working closely with the federal government to help us find the necessities to achieve our goal and return to the normality we all crave. I ask for Michiganders’ patience as our frontline workers work 24 hours to get vaccines to serve. “
“We have long planned for most Minnesotans to be vaccinated in the places where they are used to getting their health care,” Walz said in a press release. “But not everyone has a doctor or pharmacy that they are familiar with. That’s why we’ve built a reliable network of different ways Minnesotans can access the vaccine.”
People previously infected with Covid-19 may need only one dose of vaccine, the study suggests
Those already infected with coronavirus and hoping to avoid reinfection may need just one dose of vaccine instead of administering the two to most, according to a study published Monday.
People previously infected with the virus tended to have antibody levels that were higher than those of people who received both doses but were never infected, as well as more common side effects after the first dose, the authors write. of the study. was not judged by peer.
The authors argue that ‘changing the policy of giving only one dose of vaccine to these individuals would not have a negative effect on their antibody titers, save them from unnecessary pain and free up much-needed vaccine doses.’
“Ongoing follow-up studies will indicate whether these early differences in immune responses are maintained over time,” they wrote.
The CDC says people should be vaccinated, even if they have had Covid-19, because it is still unclear how long the protection of antibodies will last.
CNN’s Andrea Diaz, Deidre McPhillips, Christina Maxouris, Keith Allen, Gisela Crespo, Laurie Ure, Rebekah Riess, Amanda Sealy and Michael Nedelman contributed to this report