SAN JOSE – A potentially more contagious COVID-19 variant that is increasingly spreading in California is now ‘relatively common’ in Santa Clara County, where it has contributed to the infamous Christmas Day outbreak in an emergency room in Kaiser and several other outbreaks. .
“The variant has been identified in cases from many of these institutions, including cases related to the Kaiser outbreak, competent nursing homes, cases in prisons and shelters, and samples of test areas in the community,” the country said in a statement. . to this news organization Monday.
“This indicates that the variant is now relatively common in our community,” the statement added.
On Sunday evening, the provincial health officer, dr. Sara Cody, at state and other local health officials announced that the 452R variant was behind several of the South Bay outbreaks, including the one where at least 74 Kaiser employees and 15 patients in the ER were infected. of South San Jose Hospital.
A receptionist in a hospital has died from the outbreak of Kaiser, which is mainly attributed to an employee who paid an unannounced visit to the ER to create holiday spirit. She was wearing an inflatable Christmas tree costume that may have spread the virus because it used air with force.
Kaiser confirmed the presence of 452R in the outbreak Monday in a statement, adding that those who tested positive “are now past their contagious period and symptom-free.”
At Sunday’s press conference, officials in Santa Clara County did not formally link any other outbreaks to the variant, including a series of major figures in the country’s prisons and one that affected the San Jose State University football team before a game in played the kitchen and lost. end of a historically successful season.
Monday’s statement linked the tension to the other outbreaks, but not to the football team.
In addition to Santa Clara County, the 452R variant has been detected in the counties of Humboldt, Lake, Los Angeles, Mono, Monterey, Orange, Riverside, San Francisco, San Bernardino, San Diego and San Luis Obispo.
Cody said more and more of the 452R strain is being detected in South Bay as Santa Clara County follows more genomic sequences than most other California provinces.
“We searched more and therefore found more,” she said.
The news about the spread variant comes as virus trends show some positive signs, with the increase in COVID-19 cases and deaths reported in California on Sunday, from a week ago. About 39,700 a day, the average daily number of cases in California has dropped by about 11% in the past week. The state still averages about 513 deaths a day – more than one every three minutes – but it is only 7% higher than a week ago, compared to an increase of 43.5% the previous week.
Scientists from the University of Washington who maintain one of the most widely used and respected computer models for detecting and projecting outbreaks also say that new infections have peaked in the U.S. and major states, including California, in recent weeks.
But the positive assessment is that the public should follow the social distance, avoid gatherings and continue to wear masks, as well as the absence of a vaccine-resistant virus strain and a significantly improved distribution of vaccines.
Meanwhile, the already rocky vaccination effort has hit another issue after a group of people had severe allergic reactions to a group of Moderna vaccines in Southern California, recommended by Dr. Erica Pan, the state’s largest epidemiologist. to recommend clinics. hundreds of thousands of doses suspended.
More than 330,000 doses of the group were distributed in the state, and Santa Clara County was under different jurisdictions to announce that they were no longer working. The province said in a news release that it had no indication that any of the 21,800 doses of the investigated group that ended up at South Bay health providers had been administered.
Cody said the extent to which the variant is being processed in the Kaiser outbreak is still being investigated with the help of the state Department of Public Health and the National Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“It was a very unusual outbreak with a lot of diseases, and it seemed to spread quickly,” she said. “We are trying to understand if the characteristics of the outbreak are due to this variant … or is it related to other factors that occur in the hospital.”
Both Kaiser and public health officials stress that the rise of the mutated tribe does not justify changing existing safety protocols and practices to contract COVID-19.
“We do not yet have any signals at this stage that this variant is related to anything else such as increased severity of the disease, although we are obviously looking for any signals to see if it would appear,” Cody said.
The latest variant differs from the B.1.1.7 variant, a more contagious strain first detected in the United Kingdom. Dr. Charles Chiu, a virologist and professor of laboratory medicine at UC San Francisco, noted that the variant has a “very high rate of attack” that in some outbreaks studied leads to ’80 and 90 percent ‘infection scenarios.
Chiu said in an interview Sunday night that the first case of the variant was discovered in California in Alameda County in May. But from mid-November to the last two weeks of December, the number of COVID-19 cases linked to the strain rose from 3.8% to 25%.
“It is worrying that it could possibly be more contagious,” Chiu said at a later briefing, stressing the need for more research to determine how quickly it can be transmitted.
Staff Writers Evan Webeck, Lisa M. Krieger, John Woolfolk, Elliott Almond, and Julia Prodis Sulek contributed to this report.