CHICAGO – The British variant of coronavirus was found in Chicago, health officials announced Friday.
This variant seems to spread more easily than other forms of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19, which worries health officials. But state and city leaders have emphasized that the UK variant does not appear to cause serious cases of COVID-19, and that vaccines are effective in preventing it.
People can protect themselves as during the whole pandemic: by taking social distance, wearing a mask and staying at home, officials said.
The variant was first found in the United States two weeks ago, when someone in Colorado became ill with the strain. It has since been found in other states – including nearby Indiana and Minnesota – and officials said they think it was probably in Illinois, but that they simply have not shown it in samples yet.
“This news is not surprising and does not change our guidance on COVID-19. We must help the recommended security strategies we know to stop the spread of this virus, ‘said Dr. Allison Arwady, head of the Chicago Department of Public Health, said in a news release. “To protect Chicago, you need to continue to wear a mask, practice social distance, wash your hands regularly, have no outside guests in your home, and get vaccinated when it’s your turn.”
The Chicago variant was identified at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, which studied specimens of COVID-19 positive tests, according to the city’s health department.
The person confirmed to have been ill with the UK strain traveled to the UK and the Middle East two weeks before he was diagnosed.
The city’s health department identifies people who have had close contact with that person and have been ‘strengthened'[ing] the importance of compliance with quarantine and isolation measures, ”according to the city.
The city’s health department is monitoring the tension, as well as the health department and the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Mutations to the virus are not surprising, necessarily bad or even rare, Arwady said earlier: Experts expect to see about one mutation with SARS-CoV-2 every two weeks. Hospitals in Chicago and around the world regularly perform genetic sequencing of SARS-CoV-2 strains found in patients to look for mutations and share the results in a public database, Arwady said.
As approved vaccines are already accepted to work against the variant, and spread in the same way as other forms of the virus, city officials are not currently changing how they respond to the pandemic, Arwady said earlier.
But the variant spread rapidly in the United Kingdom, which again had to force the country into a trap.
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