An infectious disease expert at Boston Medical Center says an emerging, more contagious strain of COVID-19 may already be in the United States and spreading due to test barriers.
The strain, first discovered in the UK, is believed to be more transmissible, but there is currently no evidence that the mutated virus causes more serious diseases or increases the risk of death more than the virus strains found in the US. distributed, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The CDC says the variant ‘may already be in the US’. Why do experts not know for sure?
“To find this strain, it’s what we need to do to take a percentage of the samples that are diagnosed and do deep genetic analysis, and (in) the US, our ability has not been spectacular yet,” he said. dr. Nahid Bhadelia, medical director of the Special Pahtogens Unit at BMC, told CNBC while appearing on ‘The News with Shepard Smith’ on Monday.
Bhadelia pointed to a recent CDC report, saying that although the new virus strain was not found through sequencing – the process of detecting virus mutations – only 51,000 of the 17 million US cases were followed up.
This means that “if the tension is here, we might just miss it, because the holes in us are just too wide,” Bahedlia said.
“This is why it is important for us to continue all public health measures, because if this tension is more bearable, and in this country, it is a safe way to stop it, to continue all public health measures,” he said. she added.
According to the CDC, the mutation was first reported in the south-east of England and London, where it accounts for 60 per cent of recent infections in the city.
On Monday, the US began requiring all travelers flying from the UK to the US to test for coronavirus negatively 72 hours before departure. However, the strain strain has also been reported in several other countries, including Canada, France, Sweden, Spain and Japan.
Asked if the test requirement for British travel is a good precaution to prevent virus spread, Bhadelia notes that people can test negative before boarding a flight, but later get a positive result.
“That’s why I think it should probably be linked to some kind of quarantine,” Bhadelia said. ‘The other part is that we only need the testing of the UK. But … the tension is now in several countries, and what about travelers from those countries, right?
“The last part of this is again, since people can come here (and) possibly get infected after they get there, the best way to find it is to diagnose them quickly and determine if they have the stress,” she continued. “And this is where the capacity, laboratory capacity, is needed.”
According to the CDC, the agency launched a program last month aimed at detecting emerging mutations in COVID-19. Beginning next month, each state will “submit at least ten samples to the CDC fortnightly for sequencing and further characterization.”
“In addition, CDC’s COVID-19 response is actively seeking samples of interest, such as samples related to animal infection and in the future samples of breakthrough infections by vaccines,” the agency said.
Data is checked by the CDC and genomic data is uploaded to public databases for research, public health officials and the health industry, according to the CDC.
Get Boston.com’s email alerts:
Subscribe and receive coronavirus news and recent updates, from our newsroom to your inbox.