Even as the pandemic crisis subsided in California, federal officials and experts warned on Sunday that the dangers of the rapid growth of new strains of coronavirus underscore how urgent it will be to speed up vaccinations.
San Diego and Florida are home to two hot spots of the same new strain of the virus that devastated Britain, Dr. Scott Gottlieb, former commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, told CBS’s “Face the Nation” program News on Sunday. California has the highest number of identified cases of the UK strain – 72 – of any state, while Florida has the second highest number, with 50 cases; New York comes in third, with 22 cases.
Dr Anthony Fauci, chief medical advisor to President Biden, warned that federal officials “have every reason to believe” in the new finding by British scientists that the new strain is more deadly than the original virus.
Previously, scientists thought the UK variant – known as B.1.1.7 – was merely more transmissible, but the latest evidence suggests that those who contracted the virus are also more likely to die from it, Fauci said on Sunday. in “Face the Nation.” The UK variant has been identified in more than 20 states.
“When British researchers looked more closely at the death rate for a given age group, they found … a significant increase,” said Fauci. “We need to assume now that what has been circulating predominantly in the UK has a certain degree of increase in what we call virulence – that is, the virus’s power to do more damage, including death.”
California raises requests to stay home
Concerns about the new variants arise as Governor Gavin Newsom on Monday suspended regional California homestay requests, setting the stage for counties to reopen outdoor dining unless they decide to maintain orders stricter local health services.
“We hope to be able to reopen to some extent safely this next week,” said Dr. Grant Colfax, director of public health in San Francisco, in statements broadcast on KNTV-TV late on Sunday. “We need to continue to wear these masks and to distance ourselves socially and take precautions – we are certainly not out of danger yet – but things certainly look much better here locally than they did just a few weeks ago.”
The move comes about seven weeks after the home stay application began to be launched across much of California. The policy infuriated some restaurant owners, but health officials have credited it with avoiding an even greater catastrophe in state hospitals – which overburdened health workers and threatened rationed care among patients.
Scientists have largely credited California’s aggressive requests to stay at home for saving lives. California has the 38th worst cumulative mortality rate for COVID-19 among the 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, with 94 deaths per 100,000 residents.
Neighboring Arizona did much less to order the closure of businesses and declined masking measures across the state, allowing in-house restaurants and bars to remain open. The result is a much worse cumulative mortality rate: the tenth worst in the country and almost twice that of California – 175 deaths per 100,000 residents.
Growing concern about new deadly variants
The United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has warned that the United Kingdom variant may be the dominant strain in the United States until March. Gottlieb expressed particular concern about the emergence in San Diego and Florida, where, he said, it may already comprise 1% or 2% of new infections.
If that is the case, “they face the risk of outbreaks with these new variants because they have reached a limit where they can grow fast enough that our vaccines and our warm climate are not enough to keep them away,” said Gottlieb. “We could certainly face regionalized epidemics because of these new variants.”
A constant concern is whether current vaccines will be effective against variants. There is some suggestion that the two vaccines distributed in the United States, made by Pfizer and Moderna, appear to be protective against the UK strain, although there is a “small decrease” in how effective they are, said Fauci.
But the most worrying new variant studied worldwide is a strain that now prevails in South Africa, known as B.1.351, said Fauci. The South African strain has not been identified in the United States, but it is possible that it is here and has not been detected.
Compared to the UK strain, the South African variant “appears to further decrease the vaccine’s effectiveness. But we are still within that level of protection from vaccines being effective against these ”variants, said Fauci.
Variants may require vaccines to require updates
Authorities may need to update vaccines if circumstances change, said Fauci.
“What we will do and are already doing is preparing for the possibility that, in the future, we may need to modify and update vaccines,” said Fauci. “We don’t have to do that now. The best way to prevent the further evolution of these mutants is to vaccinate as many people as possible with the vaccines we currently have available to us. “
Gottlieb said it is not surprising that the UK variant could be more deadly.
“It has never been entirely satisfactory that the strain could be more contagious, but it would not be more pathogenic – it would not make people sicker,” said Gottlieb. If the UK strain allows the coronavirus to stick more firmly to human cells, you could easily find reasons why this variant “could be more infectious, more virulent and potentially more dangerous”.
Gottlieb said he suspects that the South African variant and a new closely related strain identified in Brazil – known as P.1 – are probably in the United States, even if they have not been detected here.
“Given how widespread it is in Brazil now, and how widespread it is in South Africa, and given all the connections we have with these nations, we have to assume that it is in the United States now.”
New strain grown in California under scrutiny
A fourth new strain, believed to be grown locally in California, has also raised concerns among scientists at UC San Francisco and Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. The new strain, called B.1.426, went from virtually undetectable to suddenly responsible for a quarter of the analyzed viral samples, and its sudden increase and distinct mutations made it the main suspect of the violent increase in the California holiday.
One of the mutations in the strain grown in California, known as L452R, alters the virus’s ability to infiltrate human cells and turn them into virus-producing factories. Over several generations, even a small improvement in this ability will help a virus to spread more easily, increasing infections, hospitalizations and deaths.
Dr. Vivek Murthy, President Biden’s nominee for general surgeon, said on ABC News’s “This Week” program on Sunday that the rise in new strains is worrying and means that Americans will need to “double public health measures, masking and avoiding internal meetings. ”
“We are in a race against these variants. The virus will change and it is up to us to adapt and ensure that we are ahead, ”said Murthy.
More than 11,000 COVID-19 deaths since January 1 in California
The latest increase in the pandemic was by far the worst in California: more than 11,000 COVID-19 deaths have been reported since New Year’s Day, an impressive number that underscores the worst public health crisis of modern times.
More than 5,000 COVID-19 deaths have been reported in LA County since New Year’s Eve. The pace of death has been so great that hospital morgues are overflowing and the National Guard has been called in to help transport the corpses to the county coroner’s office for temporary storage. In addition, air quality officials suspended monthly cremation limits.
Meanwhile, there is mounting evidence that California is emerging from its worst pandemic wave.
California, on Sunday, recorded an average of 27,000 new cases of coronavirus a day in the previous week; this is an improvement over the nearly 45,000 cases per day recorded in the seven-day period that ended on 10 January.
LA County recorded an average of 8,300 new cases of coronavirus daily in the last week starting on Sunday, a reduction of about 15,100 cases per day recorded for the seven-day period that ended on January 13. (It is possible that a reduction in daily coronavirus cases occurred as a result of declining testing capacity, such as converting Dodger Stadium from a test site to a vaccination site.)
The rate of positive coronavirus test results has also decreased. In the first week of January, 14.3% of coronavirus tests in California were positive, the highest since the first weeks of the pandemic, but last week, the rate of positivity was 8.1%.
In LA County, the positivity rate reached 22% during the last week of 2020; the latest data shows that it is now at 14%.
The number of COVID-19 patients admitted to California hospitals is still extraordinarily high, but it is also decreasing.
At the worst point of the summer wave, COVID-19 hospitalizations reached 7,170 in the state, but this month they were more than three times worse, with hospitalizations rising to 21,936 on January 6. On Saturday, 17,810 were in the hospital; Officials say it will take a month or two of decline before hospitals can begin to see significant relief.
In LA County, hospitalizations peaked at 8,098 on Jan. 5 – more than triple the summer peak. On Saturday, the number had dropped to 6,486 – the lowest number in a month.
The average number of daily deaths still remains extraordinarily high, but it has improved. About 500 Californians still die from COVID-19 a day, on average, over a weekly period, including about 200 a day in LA County.
At its peak earlier this month, about 534 Californians died each day, on average, over a weekly period, and about 241 LA county residents died each day.
Times staff writers, Taryn Luna, Jaweed Kaleem and Melissa Healy, contributed to this report.