A variant first identified in Britain, known as B.1.1.7, is also found in the US, and the modeling suggests that it could exacerbate the already horrific spread of the virus across the country, CDC- researchers said.
This means that people should try harder to wear masks, avoid gatherings and stay socially distant from each other.
“This means that it will be harder and harder to control it. Any of the measures we will have to take to a greater extent, including vaccination,” said Dr. Gregory Armstrong, who runs the Office of Advanced Molecular Detection. CDC’s division for respiratory diseases, told CNN.
“Numerous pieces of evidence suggest that B.1.1.7 is transmitted more efficiently than other SARS-CoV-2 variants,” Armstrong and colleagues wrote in the agency’s weekly report, the MMWR.
“Variant B.1.1.7 has the potential to increase the US pandemic orbit in the coming months.”
Efforts to vaccinate people – which are slower than the federal government had hoped and promised – must be stepped up, the CDC said.
” A higher vaccination coverage may need to be achieved to protect the public, ” the researchers wrote.
The virus has already infected more people in the US and killed more than in any other country. According to Johns Hopkins University, the virus was diagnosed in 23 million people in the U.S. as of Friday afternoon, killing more than 390,000.
The B.1.1.7 variant seems to infect human cells more easily, which will help infect more people.
It has been detected in about a dozen U.S. states, but the CDC also knows that surveillance is poor and that it is probably much more common than that. It is also possible that the pattern of mutations that make the virus more transmissible arises independently as it circulates in humans, because the more people become infected, the greater the chance that the virus will mutate.
The CDC team conducted an experimental model to see what might happen in the near future. It is not known how much transmissible B.1.1.7 is, nor is it known how much immunity there is in the American population due to previous infections, so the team has made assumptions. In one scenario, the new variant is 50% more contagious than the current dominant variants.
“In this model, the prevalence of B.1.1.7 is initially low, but because it is more transmissible than the current variant, it shows rapid growth in early 2021 and becomes the predominant variant in March,” the CDC team said. writing.
“If it behaves as it has done so far in the UK, Denmark and Ireland, then it will become a bigger and bigger part of all the business, no matter what we do,” Armstrong said.
“That does not mean that things will necessarily go up,” Armstrong added. “That does not mean we can do nothing.”
The new variant apparently does not result in higher hospitalization rates or higher mortality rates, he noted.
“While there is a high probability that it will become a bigger and bigger part of all cases, the number of cases does not have to increase if we can get people to stick more to the recommended measures,” Armstrong said. said.
In addition, the CDC needs to do more to keep an eye on new variants and the appearance of this one.
‘CDC has also contracted with several large commercial clinical laboratories to quickly compile tens of thousands of SARS-CoV-2 positive samples each month and has funded seven academic institutions to conduct genomic surveillance in partnership with public health agencies, making a significant contribution to deliver timely genomic surveillance data from across the United States, ‘the team wrote.
The CDC is also keeping an eye on a variant that was first spotted in South Africa and is now called B.1.351, plus one seen among four travelers from Brazil when they landed in Japan, called B.1.1.28.
“These variants contain a constellation of genetic mutations,” the CDC team wrote.
The concern is that the virus may change in a way that may help it evade the immunity caused by vaccination, or the immunity that occurs with antibody-based treatments. The new coronavirus vaccines are designed to change quickly and easily to suit new circulating strains, but a major change will mean that people will have to be vaccinated again.
It is also possible that some of the changes may make it more difficult to detect the virus in standard tests.
And the CDC is also concerned that if the virus changes in just the right way, it could re-infect people who have already recovered from coronavirus. Flu is already doing it.