This board of streaming video from the Governor’s Office shows California Governor Gavin Newsom, on the left, and Dr. Anthony Fauci during a conversation, Wednesday, December 30, 2020. | Governor’s Office via AP
OAKLAND – The new coronavirus variant originally found in the UK arrived in San Diego County – making California the second state to detect the strain, which could be more contagious.
Governor Gavin Newsom announced the discovery during a live broadcast with Anthony Fauci, the country’s leading infectious disease specialist. At the time, Newsom said the strain was found in southern California.
The news of the strain’s arrival did not surprise Fauci, who described Covid-19 and other RNA viruses in the same family as “making a living from mutations” and said he was about to get here. “I don’t think Californians should think this is strange,” he said. “This is something to be expected.”
The new strain: The presence of the new mutant strain in the United States was first documented on Tuesday in Colorado. Two patients in that state were reported with the new variant, state health officials reported.
San Diego supervisor Nathan Fletcher said at a news conference on Wednesday that the patient is a 30-year-old man with no “travel history”.
Mark Ghaly, secretary of the state’s Health and Human Services Agency, called the detection “worrying.”
“As we learn more about how this patient contracted this strain, I want to emphasize the importance of continuing our mitigation efforts to prevent Covid-19 and this new strain,” said Ghaly in a statement, asking people to follow the protocols for public health and avoid traveling and mixing outside the home.
Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, stressed that the first evidence shows that the new strain spreads more easily, but does not make people sicker or appears to be more lethal. Fauci said that many mutations are irrelevant, but “this particular mutation makes the virus better at transmitting from one person to another”.
Circulating Covid-19 vaccines must provide immunity to this strain.
The wave: Fauci spoke to the governor at a time when California is experiencing an outbreak that has made it an epicenter for the pandemic across the country. The intensive care unit’s capacity has reached 0 percent across the state, as hospitals turn to alternative care facilities and other arrangements to care for patients. The rate of new cases at Covid-19 has declined in recent days, but the state has not yet experienced the impact of travel and Christmas parties.
“We were hit hard and, unfortunately, California [been] it has now reached as bad as anyone, if not worse, ”said Fauci. Newsom quickly countered that California’s positivity rate – or the percentage of positive tests from all Covid-19 tests – is lower than that of many other states.
When asked what was most surprising during the course of the pandemic, Fauci told the governor that he hoped that after the initial restrictions imposed across the country in the spring, the basic infection rate would be low enough for outbreaks, or “stinging”. , as he described them, could be contained through methods of case identification, isolation and contact tracking. But the case count skyrocketed when the country began to open up.
Fauci also noted that some of the challenges of the pandemic have been more difficult than those he and other public health experts faced during the AIDS / HIV crisis. “It was nothing like the division of what we are seeing now that really makes the implementation of public health and public health messages very difficult,” he said.
In vaccinations and reopening: Fauci, who spoke with Newsom on the day the governor released his school reopening plan, emphasized the importance of reopening schools safely and noted that schools tend to have lower infection rates than the surrounding community.
Fauci said the country should put more emphasis on testing antigens to monitor outbreaks in places like schools, prisons and nursing homes. With the advent of the vaccine, he said he hoped the country would achieve an “appearance of normality”, with the return of sports, theater and other major events in the fall.
“As we gradually vaccinate more and more people, we will look at this in the rear view mirror,” said Fauci.