A coronavirus variant with the same mutations as the highly contagious British variant has been possible in the US since October and is already widespread, according to a re-analysis of more than 2 million tests.
Genome sequencing to confirm whether the variant observed in Americans is the same as the so-called B117 variant currently circulating in the United Kingdom is currently underway.
Results are expected within days, but the revelations have raised new questions about where the altered virus originated, including a small possibility that it started in the US, not in the UK or elsewhere. The variant has also been found in at least 17 countries, including South Korea, Spain, Australia and Canada.
“It would not be at all surprising if at least some of the cases were B117,” said Eric Topol, head of the Scripps Research Translational Institute in La Jolla, California, who was not involved in the research but whose team’s. a Californian confirmed. case of the B117 variant Wednesday.
“It’s probably been here at low levels for a while – but you only see it when you look for it.”
The British health secretary announced the existence of a new and highly transmissible Sars CoV-2 variant on 14 December, after laboratories of Covid tests reported that a growing number of their positive samples showed a signal from one of the three genes are missing from their PCR. tests used to confirm the presence of the virus.
Further sequencing revealed that such “S-gene failure” was due to mutations in the gene encoding the peak protein that the virus uses to gain access to human cells. The variant is suspected to have been spreading in the UK since September.
The news of the new variant has led to several countries traveling from the UK – or in the case of the US – restricting travelers from having to provide evidence of a negative Covid-19 test to enter the country. However, the first known U.S. cases were detected in Colorado and California earlier this week, and it is suspected that they may already be widespread.
In the last hours of Dec. 31, a third U.S. state, Florida, officially reported a case of the coronavirus variant, a man in his twenties in Martin County, north of West Palm Beach, who had no recent history of travel did not, the Florida Health Department said.
To investigate this, scientists from the California DNA testing company Helix investigated the incidence of S gene failure among 2 million of the Covid tests that the company has processed in recent months. They observed an increase in S gene failure among positive samples since early October, when 0.25% of the positive tests showed this pattern.
It has since grown, averaging 0.5% last week – although in Massachusetts, with the highest number of such samples, it is currently 1.85%, although no cases of the B117 variant have been announced in the state yet.
Further analysis showed mutations in some of the same regions of the S gene, which also occur in the B117 variant – although complete sequencing of the viral genome is necessary to confirm whether it is the same variant, or something else.
The coronavirus pandemic is out of control in the US, with the death toll in 24 hours of more than 3,740 earlier this week marking the worst day of the outbreak in the country.
Public health experts and Joe Biden, the elected Democratic president, have warned that the situation will worsen before it gets better, even if vaccines are put into effect.
Helix is currently working with the US Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) as it awaits test results on the US variant.
‘If we [B117 variant], then we might see if it was introduced to the US one or more times, or if it mutated further, ”says Nicole Washington, co-director of research at Helix, whose research was published as a pre-print. and has not yet been peer-reviewed.
“If all the monsters have it, it’s probably been here for a while, but if only one or two monsters have it, it could be that it’s been launched recently and we’re just starting to see it spread.”
It is also possible that the variant originated in the US and then spread to the United Kingdom – although this is unlikely, as the B117 variant appears to be more common in England, Topol said. “However, I do not think it should be called the British variant, because we do not know where it comes from.”
If B117 is widely based in the US, travel bans are unlikely to work, Topol added: ‘The variant is likely to become dominant [within the US] ‘in the next few months, what we need to do, therefore, is to overcome it by a combination of very strict mitigation measures, including supervision and testing, and vaccination as if there is no tomorrow,’ ‘he said. “The vaccines should work well.”
Even though the variant identified by Helix is not B117, the nature of some mutations it contains is important because it can increase the virus’ ability to infect human cells, said Ravi Gupta, a professor of clinical practice. microbiology at the University of Cambridge, added. , UK, which helped to sequence the B117 variant.
Meanwhile, the US has fallen far short of the targets set by the US government for the number of people it had hoped to inoculate by the end of 2020.
Leading U.S. expert in infectious diseases, Anthony Fauci, on Thursday called on the federal government to use more resources to vaccinate Americans.
As overworked, underfunded state health departments scrambled to administer the vaccines, some senior citizens waited overnight to receive their first dose in Florida.
‘We would like to see it run smoothly and that people have had 20 million doses in humans … by the end of 2020, which was the forecast. That, of course, was not the case, and it’s disappointing, “Fauci told NBC on Thursday.