A man receives a COVID-19 test of the nose through the Tom Bradley International Terminal at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) amid a coronavirus surge in Southern California on December 22, 2020 in Los Angeles, California .
Mario Tama | Getty Images
Three states in the US have now identified cases of the new coronavirus strain in people with no travel history, a sign that the variant could have already unknowingly spread among Americans.
Florida health officials announced Thursday that they have found the first case of the state of Covid-19 with the new, more contagious virus variant. The man, who lives in the county just north of West Palm Beach, is in his twenties with no travel history, the Florida Department of Health in a Twitter post.
The man from Florida is one of the first handful of people to be diagnosed with the new variant, known as B.1.1.7., Which was first identified in the UK. California has now identified at least four cases of the new strain in the province of San Diego among men with no travel history. The cases come just days after health officials in Colorado tracked down the first few cases in people who did not travel.
“I’m not surprised you have a case, and probably more cases, in California,” said White House coronavirus adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci, told Gavin Newsom on Wednesday after announcing that state health officials had found their first case. “We will probably see reports from other states.”
U.S. health officials said the arrival of the variant in the country is not a surprise, though it could worsen matters if allowed to spread unchecked. While evidence suggests that the new strain is easier and faster to transmit compared to previous versions of the virus, it is not thought to cause more serious diseases in infected people, and current vaccines should still work against it, US Centers for Disease Control said. and prevention said. on a conference call Wednesday.
The new variant threatens to make matters worse if more people are admitted to the hospital due to its spread, experts said. December was the deadliest month of the US pandemic, as hospitals reached their capacity and the long-awaited vaccination of vaccines was finally slower than expected.
The country reported more than 6.3 million new infections and more than 77,500 deaths during December, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. In the course of 2021, just over 125,000 people are currently hospitalized in the Covid-19 – more than double the highs set in mid-April last year, according to data from the COVID Tracking Project, published by journalists at The Atlantic managed.
Another cause for concern: the first cases of the new variant have been found in the country with the most population amid a busy holiday season, Mercedes Carnethon, vice president of preventive medicine at Northwestern University, told MSNBC on Friday.
TSA officials said they selected 1.28 million passengers at U.S. airports on Sunday after Christmas, the highest number since Covid halted travel in mid-March.
“Based on the photos we all saw of TSA checkpoints during the holidays, we can be sure that millions of people traveled under these destinations,” Carnethon said. “We can be pretty sure that this variant is everywhere now.”
Recent evidence from Imperial College London also shows that the new variant seems to affect people under the age of 20 more than older adults. However, part of the move may be because schools remained open during a period of lock-in orders, the study said.
The age difference could be a problem because younger people are likely to be essential workers in the community, and they are not the first to be vaccinated, Carnethon said.
“I think the priority, in my opinion, should be to reinforce the basic messages we know about how to stop the spread of the community,” Carnethon said. “As we well know, our vaccination strategy begins with building our infrastructure of health workers. However, it is not necessarily the population that leads to the spread of the coronavirus in the community.”