Three highly contagious COVID-19 variants are estimated to account for more than half of all infections in Massachusetts, expert witnesses said Tuesday during a state legislative hearing.
Dr. Bronwyn MacInnis, director of pathogen genome surveillance at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, testified to lawmakers that the three so-called “variants of concern” as of Monday night are more transmissible than the initial versions of the virus, rising to more than 50 percent from to make the nationwide sampling of cases investigated by the Cambridge Research Center.
“The horse is outside the gate,” MacInnis said, pushing the threshold.meaningful ”if not terribly surprising. ”
Federal data show that the B.1.1.7. variant, which originated in the United Kingdom, is now by far the most common version of COVID-19 in the United States. Massachusetts is also the state with the most identified cases of the P.1 variant, first detected in Brazil, due to a recent group of infections on Cape Cod and the relatively robust order of the state.
In Massachusetts, according to federal data, there were a total of 1100 cases of the B.1.1.7 variant, 102 cases of the P.1 variant and 12 cases of the B.1.351 variant, occurring in South Africa has. But the numbers come from a small chunk of overall cases; MacInnis says the state currently follows about 1.4 percent of all cases, slightly above the national average of about 1 percent.
Although concerned about the trends, experts have also noted that public health data suggest that the variations have been at least somewhat blunted by the vaccinations.
Dr. Paul Biddinger, head of emergency preparedness at Massachusetts General Hospital and chairman of the COVID-19 advisory group for the state, noted that deaths from the disease have continued to decline largely since early February, even though the decline in infections and hospitalizations has decreased and increased slightly at the end of March. Biddinger attributed the divergent trends to the deployment of the vaccines, which put older residents and other individuals who are more vulnerable to serious illnesses due to COVID-19 at the forefront. Government officials say more than 80 percent of residents over the age of 75, who still have a very disproportionate number of COVID-19 deaths in the state, have been vaccinated.
“Obviously we want to decrease, but … I think we see a bit of a disconnect between the incidence of cases and new cases, and the consequences of hospitalizations and deaths,” Biddinger said during the trial on Tuesday, adding that the new a phenomenon makes it “incredibly difficult” to analyze the data given how hospitalization and mortality trends are already behind reported infections.
As of Monday afternoon, Massachusetts still had more than 1,600 new cases per day and admitted 699 patients to the hospital due to COVID-19. However, for the first time since March 2020, the state is also increasing an average of less than ten deaths per day.
Biddinger advised government officials to be constantly ‘vigilant’ and ‘nimble’, but suggested that the current incidence, even with the emergence of variants, need not be tightened.
“The most important thing, and this is of course said with the prejudice of a doctor, is to prevent hospitalizations and deaths,” Biddinger said, adding that any increase in hospitalizations should be taken seriously.
“COVID constantly surprised us,” he said.
Asked what additional action would be needed, Biddinger said hospitalizations due to COVID-19 entering more than 1,000 will begin to harness the state’s health resources. He also said that new daily infections, rising to over 3,000 in the mid-2000s, “are a case I am concerned about.”
At the same time, experts said the state should work to increase genomic sequencing to monitor new relevant and unknown variants. Dr. Nahid Bhadelia, a physician for infectious diseases at Boston Medical Center, said additional emerging variants will be an ongoing challenge over the next few years, especially due to the global gap between rich and poor countries in terms of vaccine access.
MacInnis said Massachusetts should aim to track 5 percent of all positive COVID-19 cases, confidently consider existing variants and ‘identify emerging threats’.
“Actually, every virus is somehow a variant of each other,” she said. “We are therefore constantly investigating the landscape for variants that splash beneath the surface that are not classified as formal variants or variants of interest, but which can be threats. And this is important because we have found the well-known variants worldwide where we have looked, and we are only now at the point where we can look with a deep resolution at what is circulating in the state. ‘
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