Los Angeles County and the rest of the country are rushing in time to vaccinate as many people as possible against the coronavirus before an even more contagious variant takes hold.
These concerns were underscored in a U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report released Friday, which stated that new modeling points to the variant “which has the potential to increase the U.S. pandemic trajectory in the coming months,” he said. with the projection showing “rapid growth in early 2021, the predominant variant will be in March.”
The new strain, first identified in Britain, weighs heavily in the minds of public health officials in LA County as they weigh potential new health orders to promote the spread of the disease.
Institutions that could be further investigated include outdoor gyms, which are allowed to open at 50%, and indoor malls, which are supposed to keep only 20% open, LA Mayor Eric Garcetti said Thursday night.
The director of public health, Barbara Ferrer, said this week that she is also concerned about the variant – which, although yet to be officially found in LA County, has already been identified in the provinces of San Diego and San Bernardino.
Ferrer said the CDC is urging public health officials nationwide to do whatever is necessary to prevent transmission, so the variant is not the most dominant form of the virus circulating for as long as possible. ‘
“What we’re really trying to do here is really an opportunity to get as many people vaccinated as possible before getting the variant in hand,” Ferrer said. “Does that mean we need to go back to the drawing board and look at everything we do, and really evaluate how we can gain more control over the boom in a very short amount of time, more ability to speed up transfer?”
Scientists believe that the variant, known as B.1.1.7, is no longer lethal or makes people sick once they are infected. There is also no evidence that the newly developed coronavirus vaccines will not be effective against it.
But because the variant is apparently more easily transmitted, it is considered particularly dangerous. Health officials have long warned of the cascading effect of the coronavirus: The more people become infected, the more people will have to be hospitalized and the more people will die.
Current projections by experts show that, according to Ferrer, the UK variant, if left unchecked, will dominate locally by March.
“It’s our time to try to get the flood under control before the variant is widespread,” she said.
The latest CDC report warned of an increase in distribution: ‘may threaten endangered health resources, require extensive and stricter implementation of public health strategies and increase the percentage of population immunity required for pandemic control.’
“The increased portability of the B.1.1.7 variant justifies strict implementation of public health strategies to reduce the transmission and reduce the potential impact … to buy critical time to increase the vaccination,” the report reads. “CDC’s modeling data show that universal use and increased adherence to mitigation measures and vaccination are crucial to significantly reduce the number of new cases and deaths in the coming months.”
Although “there is no known difference in clinical outcomes” when it comes to the variant, the CDC report noted a sobering reality: ‘A higher transmission rate will lead to more cases, which will increase the number of people in general requiring clinical care, which exacerbates the burden on an already strained healthcare system leading to more deaths. ‘
According to the CDC, the variant is estimated to have originated in Britain for the first time in September.
At least 38 cases have been identified so far in California, among the most of any state. At least 22 have been identified in Florida, and cases have also been confirmed in Colorado, Texas, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Indiana, Georgia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York and Connecticut.
“Absolutely, that’s our concern,” said Dr. Mark Ghaly, the secretary of health and human services in California, said during a briefing Tuesday.
First, the presence of the variant illustrates why activities outside the home now pose a higher risk than months, even weeks ago.
‘We are worried that we will see it even if it rises, if it becomes widespread [more] increased transfer to where we are now, ”Ghaly said. “The transfer rates are going to be significantly harder to contain if we see a wider spread of this UK or this B.1.1.7 variant.”
The faster vaccines can get into the arms of Californians, Ghaly added, the less impact the variant will have in California, ‘but in the short term,’ [we are] very concerned about it. ”
Ghaly indicated the new variant earlier as a bit tougher than the COVID virus we’ve seen so far. ‘
In other words, the variant seems to be able to adhere to a human cell much more easily so that it can hijack, begin to repeat, and spread throughout the body.
The B.1.1.7 variant accounted for 20% of new infections in the south-east of England in November.
The cases so far identified in the provinces of San Bernardino and San Diego come from at least 20 different households that are apparently not particularly related, with no clear connection to travel abroad, Drs. George Rutherford, an expert on epidemiologism and infectious diseases, said. UC San Francisco.
“It all suggests that the distribution of this variant is spreading much wider than we are currently detecting,” Rutherford said during a city council meeting on campus last week.
Increasing study has confirmed the early suspicion of some scientists: the variant is a super-distributor that can spread the pandemic and displace less transmissible strains of the virus.
Once established in the US – a prospective expert considers it inevitable – it will require stricter public health measures than hitherto adopted, a faster vaccination of vaccines and a much greater willingness among residents to be immunized.
“We’re losing the race to coronavirus – it infects humans much faster than we can get vaccinated in humans’ arms, and it overcomes our social distance,” said biologist Derek Cummings, an expert on emerging pathogens. “Now there is this variant that will make the race even harder.”
No decision has yet been made on further restrictions under the LA County Home Order.
‘I will support what [the Department of] “Public Health recommends and our health professionals recommend,” Garcetti said on Thursday night.
He said it was possible that additional closures were not necessary if the pandemic seemed to be stabilizing, ‘but at the moment it’s rising, as we saw in December – at any rate like this – it is absolutely something we can not sustain and most importantly, our hospitals can not. ”
In the past week, most areas of LA County have had at least one day where they had no or one available ICU beds, including central LA, the Antelope Valley, San Fernando Valley, San Gabriel Valley, and Southeast LA County. The Westside has as few as three available beds available, and the South Bay and Long Beach region reported as few as six.
LA County reached another milestone on Thursday, officially surpassing 13,000 local deaths due to COVID-19.
Cumulatively, the country has reported 13,244 deaths and 976,075 coronavirus cases since the onset of the pandemic.
More than 2,000 of the COVID-19 deaths in the country have been reported in the past nine days.
Times author Melissa Healy contributed to this report.