Los Angeles County and the rest of the country are in a race against time to vaccinate as many people as possible against the coronavirus before a strain considered even more contagious appears.
These concerns were highlighted in a report by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released on Friday, which stated that the new modeling indicates that the variant “has the potential to increase the path of the pandemic in the US in the coming months”, with the projection showing “rapid growth in early 2021, becoming the predominant variant in March.”
The new strain, first identified in Britain, weighs heavily on the minds of LA county public health officials as they evaluate new health prescriptions aimed at preventing the spread of the disease.
Configurations that could be examined still include outdoor gyms, which were allowed to open at 50% capacity, and indoor and retail malls, which were supposed to be open at only 20% capacity, said LA Mayor Eric Garcetti, on Thursday night.
Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer said this week that she is also concerned about the variant – which, although not yet officially found in LA County, has already been identified in San Diego and San Bernardino counties.
Ferrer said the CDC is urging public health officials across the country to do whatever it takes to prevent transmission “so that this variant is not considered the most dominant form of the virus that circulates for as long as possible.”
“What we’re really trying to do here is kind of create the opportunity to really vaccinate as many people as possible before this variant is implemented,” said Ferrer. “Does that mean we have to go back to the drawing board and look at everything we are doing and really assess how, in a very short period of time, we can get more control over the wave, more capacity to actually lower transmission rates?”
Scientists believe that the variant, known as B.1.1.7, is not more likely to be fatal or make people sicker after being infected. There is also no evidence that newly developed coronavirus vaccines are not effective against it.
But since the variant is believed to be more easily transmitted, it is considered particularly dangerous. Health officials have long warned of the cascading effect of coronavirus: the more people become infected, the more people will need to be hospitalized and the more people will die.
Current expert projections show that, if left unchecked, the UK variant could dominate locally in March, according to Ferrer.
“This is our time to try to control the sudden increase – before the variant spreads,” she said.
Increased transmission, warned the CDC’s latest report, “can threaten depleted health resources, require a more extensive and rigorous implementation of public health strategies and increase the percentage of population immunity needed to control the pandemic.”
“Increasing the transmissibility of variant B.1.1.7 ensures the rigorous implementation of public health strategies to reduce transmission and decrease the potential impact … saving critical time to increase vaccination coverage,” said the report. “CDC modeling data shows that universal use and increased compliance with mitigation and vaccination measures are crucial to substantially reducing the number of new cases and deaths in the coming months.”
Although “there is no known difference in clinical outcomes” when it comes to the variant, the CDC report noted a worrying reality: “A higher rate of transmission will lead to more cases, increasing the number of people in general who need clinical care, exacerbating the burden on an already strained health system and resulting in more deaths. ”
According to the CDC, it is estimated that the variant first appeared in Britain in September.
At least 38 cases have been identified so far in California, among the largest in any state. At least 22 have been identified in Florida, and cases have also been confirmed in Colorado, Texas, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Indiana, Georgia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York and Connecticut.
“It is certainly our concern,” said Dr. Mark Ghaly, California’s secretary of health and human services, at a news conference on Tuesday.
On the one hand, the presence of the variant illustrates why activities outside the home are at greater risk now than months, even weeks ago.
“We are concerned that if it takes off, if it becomes more widespread, we will even see [more] increased transmission compared to where we are now, ”said Ghaly. “Transmission rates will be significantly more difficult to contain if we see a more widespread proliferation of this UK or of this variant B.1.1.7.”
The faster vaccines reach the Californians, Ghaly added, the less impact the variant will have on California, “but in the short term, [we are] very concerned about it. “
Ghaly had previously characterized the new variant as “a little stickier than the COVID virus we’ve seen so far”.
In other words, the variant appears to have much easier to adhere to a human cell so that it can hijack it, start to replicate and spread throughout the body.
Variant B.1.1.7 was responsible for 20% of new infections in south-east England in November.
The cases identified in San Bernardino and San Diego counties have so far come from at least 20 different families that do not appear to be particularly related, with no clear link to travel abroad, said Dr. George Rutherford, an epidemiologist and infectious disease specialist at UC San Francisco.
“It all suggests that there is a much broader transmission of this variant than we are now detecting,” said Rutherford at a meeting at the campus prefecture last week.
The increase in the study confirmed the first suspicions of some scientists: the variant is a super propagator, capable of expanding the pandemic and supplanting less transmissible strains of the virus.
Once established in the United States – a perspective that experts consider inevitable – frustrating it will require stricter public health measures than those adopted so far, a faster launch of the vaccine and a much greater desire among residents to be immunized.
“We are losing the race with the coronavirus – it is infecting people much faster than we can put the vaccine in people’s arms and it is overcoming our social distance,” said biologist Derek Cummings of the University of Florida, an expert on emerging pathogens. “Now there is this variant that will make the race even more difficult.”
No decision has yet been made on further restrictions on the order to remain at home in LA County.
“I will support what [the Department of] Public Health recommends and our public health professionals recommend it, ”said Garcetti on Thursday night.
He said it is possible that additional closings are not necessary if it appears that the pandemic is stabilizing, “but the moment it increases, as we saw in December – at any rate like this – this is certainly something we cannot sustain. and most importantly, our hospitals cannot. “
Last week, most regions in LA County had at least one day that reported zero or an available ICU bed, including downtown LA, Antelope Valley, San Fernando Valley, San Gabriel Valley and southeast LA County. Westside reported only three available ICU beds, and the South Bay and Long Beach region reported only six.
LA County reached another milestone on Thursday, officially surpassing 13,000 local deaths from COVID-19.
Cumulatively, the county has reported 13,244 deaths and 976,075 cases of coronavirus since the pandemic began.
More than 2,000 of the county’s COVID-19 deaths have been reported in the past nine days alone.
Times staff writer Melissa Healy contributed to this report.