Assistant Health and Human Services Secretary Admin. Brett Giroir said Monday that a new, faster spread of the coronavirus first found in the UK is “likely” already in the US, although he warned officials have no evidence of its presence yet.
In an interview with “Good Morning America”, Giroir warned that authorities suspect that the new virus mutation has already made the leap from the UK to North America, despite the US and more than a dozen other countries enforcing travel restrictions.
“We do not have any evidence that it is here, but we suspect it will probably be here, given the global interconnectedness,” Giroir said. “We have no evidence that it is here. It is certainly not widespread here, but we must look and make sure it is not here.”
“And we still believe – have no absolute evidence – but we have very good evidence and believe that the vaccines will still be effective,” Giroir added.
The no. 2 HHS official further said that although the new strain of COVID-19 is likely to spread faster, there is “no evidence that it is more serious” than the version that has been spreading in the US for months.
His comments reflect those of Scott Gottlieb, former head of the Food and Drug Administration, who told CBS ‘Face the Nation on Sunday that the new strain of COVID-19 “probably here in the United States” in a “reasonable number of people is.
“We do not sequence many samples in this country, and much of the sequence that is done is done in private laboratories and is not aggregated in public databases. It needs to be corrected,” Gottlieb said of the testing. issues that have hampered U.S. efforts to detect the new tensions. “In the UK they order about ten per cent of all samples. Here we do a fraction of 1 per cent.”
Officials in Canada revealed on Saturday that they had tracked down two cases of the new COVID-19 strain, which occurred in a couple with no travel history or known exposure to the virus.
The U.S. passed 19 million confirmed COVID-19 cases on Sunday, while more than 320,000 died across the country from the virus.