“I know these variants are of concern, especially because we are seeing signs of progress,” said the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Rochelle Walensky, said during an information session in the White House on Wednesday. ‘I’m talking about it today because I’m worried too.
“The continued proliferation of more transferable variants could jeopardize the progress we have made over the past month if we make uncertain.”
The new study, published in CDC’s weekly report on morbidity and mortality, describes people aged 15 to 41 whose samples were collected from mid-December to mid-January; five reported Covid-19-like symptoms and three were asymptomatic.
Among the eight people, three had a history of international travel in the two weeks before they became ill, including two who traveled to West Africa and one who traveled to the Dominican Republic, and three others who traveled to California. One person was exposed to the virus at home, and another in the community. No one had a history of traveling to the UK.
Identification of the variant in Minnesota “emphasizes the importance of mitigation measures such as mask use, physical distance, avoidance of crowds and poorly ventilated indoor spaces, isolation of persons with diagnosed COVID-19, quarantine of close contact with persons with COVID-19, compliance of CDC travel guidance, ”reads the report.
During the White House briefing, Walensky said it was “more important than ever for us to do everything in our power to reduce the spread.”
“Fewer cases means fewer opportunities for the variants to spread and fewer opportunities for new variants to emerge,” she said.
The CDC reported on Tuesday that at least 1,299 cases of coronavirus strains first detected in the United Kingdom, South Africa and Brazil have been reported in the United States. The vast majority of these cases, 1,277, are the B.1.1.7 variant originally detected in the United Kingdom. This variant has been found in 41 states and Washington, DC. About a third are in Florida.
Nineteen of the 1,299 are the B.1.351 variant that was first identified in South Africa. The P.1 strain that was first linked to Brazil was discovered among two cases in Minnesota and one in Oklahoma.
These numbers do not represent the total number of such cases distributed in the United States, but only those found by analyzing positive samples.
Rapid increase in cases is ‘not inevitable’
The B.1.351 variant may also spread elsewhere in southern Africa, where many countries saw a rapid increase in Covid-19 case numbers in December and January, the report said.
“The prevalence of the B.1.351 variant is of concern to public health due to the possibility of increased transmissibility and thus increase in cases, hospitalizations and deaths,” researchers wrote.
“The possibility of a similar experience in the US is a real threat,” Walensky and her co-authors wrote in the medical journal JAMA. “However, such an outcome is not inevitable; the US and other countries have the ability to prevent this outcome from occurring with a strong and immediate response to public health.”
They note that the US Department of Health and Human Services’ SARS-CoV-2 Interagency Group was developed to increase coordination between agencies, including to quickly identify and monitor varieties. Agencies evaluate testing, re-infection study, and therapy assessment. They continue to study how the vaccines are affected by the variants, and investigate a breakthrough infection that occurs after vaccination.
Although the U.S. Covid-19 cases are falling, they said the distribution of keys is essential, as well as accelerated vaccination.
There is also a push to increase sequencing surveillance in the United States – state health departments handle 750 samples per week, and CDC is now contracting with commercial laboratories to “significantly increase” surveillance to more than 6,000 samples per week.
“A joint and well-coordinated public health effort, coupled with a rapid and widespread uptake of effective vaccines, is essential to prevent the inevitable evolution of variants that could dangerously accelerate the path of the pandemic,” Walensky and her co-authors written. .