Two South Carolina patients are the first in the United States to be diagnosed with a mutated coronavirus strain, raising concerns that this more communicable variant may become dominant here and across the country.
There are now some variants of COVID-19 spread across different parts of the world. The SC Department of Health and Environmental Control announced on Thursday that the two patients in South Carolina had been diagnosed with variant B.1.351, a strain first identified in South Africa about six weeks ago.
President Joe Biden added the African country to a travel ban earlier this week in order to mitigate the spread of the virus, but the restrictions come weeks after South Carolina patients tested positive in early January. It was determined just this week that they tested positive for this new specific variant.
One patient is from Lowcountry and the other is from Pee Dee, according to DHEC, and both are now “doing well,” according to a health department official. The agency released some other personal details, citing patient privacy, but said the two cases were unrelated and neither person had a known travel history.
Although variant B.1.351 is believed to spread more readily than SARS-CoV-2, it is not known to cause more serious cases of COVID-19. The vaccines currently being administered are also considered to be protective against the new strains, although Moderna, one of two manufacturers of vaccines against the coronavirus, says it is now looking to produce a booster injection that would make inoculation more effective against the South African strain.
But with South Carolina ranked second in the country in new cases per capita, according to a report by the White House task force, a virus that picks up speed is the last thing the state needs when facing its worst outbreak. disease that has killed approximately 6,700 people here. It is spreading so quickly that DHEC says it has reduced its contact tracking goals.
“We know that viruses mutate to live and live to mutate,” said Dr. Brannon Traxler, interim director of public health at DHEC. She added that the same social detachment measures that proved to work last year will also prevent the spread of the mutant strain.
Neither DHEC nor the Governor’s Office suggested further blockades or restrictions on Thursday to prevent the disease from spreading.
“This is important information for Southern Carolinians to have, but it is not a reason for panic,” Governor Henry McMaster wrote to his constituents on Twitter about the new variety.
The fact that the two cases have no known connection to travel suggests that the mutant virus is already spreading in South Carolina. It is impossible to say how prevalent it has already become. Although the state health department processes more than 100,000 tests for COVID-19 each week, DHEC only sequences the genetic material from two dozen samples a week to look for variants, The Post and Courier recently reported.
Traxler said DHEC is constantly increasing the number of samples it runs to find out how prevalent the strain has become. Private laboratories also test the variants.
Each of the two Southern Carolinians who tested positive for variant B.1.351 was diagnosed with COVID-19 in early January. DHEC acknowledged that it took several weeks to determine that these COVID-19 positive cases were, in fact, a different variant than what has already been detected in the USA. The agency explained that it takes time to sequence the samples to determine if it is an example of one of the variants, and Traxler said that these efforts are not as urgent as diagnostic tests.
“The urgency is still to diagnose someone whether he has COVID-19 or not,” she said.
The largest diagnostic company LabCorp discovered one of two cases in its tests, and DHEC was notified on Wednesday night. The agency found the other positive case, also on Wednesday, through routine sampling it did on Monday.
Variants of the virus that causes COVID-19 began to appear internationally last year, according to the World Health Organization.
The three Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are concerned, and with the news from South Carolina on Thursday, they were all found somewhere in the United States.
A variety that first appeared in the United Kingdom on December 14 has become dominant in that country and has led to further blockages. During a meeting at the White House on Wednesday, the new director of the CDC said that 308 cases of the UK variant were confirmed in 26 states.
South Carolina was not one of them.
A first case of the Brazilian variant in the United States was announced on Tuesday. A person who traveled from a Latin American country to Minnesota tested positive for this strain.
The CDC also states that laboratory tests that have become the standard for health departments and hospitals must be able to detect the variant and return a positive result.
These results do not indicate whether the individual has the variant strain or not, only if they are positive or negative for COVID-19. More laboratory tests would be needed to find out, said Dr. Krutika Kuppalli, a member of the infectious disease faculty at the Medical University of South Carolina.
Knowing that the strain is present is important information for researchers studying the spread of the disease.
While it may not make a difference to the individual which strain of the coronavirus he catches, Kuppalli said it is more important than ever to follow the guidelines for social distance, practice good hand hygiene and wear a mask. These measures will work independently and, if practiced aggressively, can prevent the variant from becoming dominant here.
“All you have to do is look at what’s going on in England and worry about what’s going to happen in other parts of the world,” she said.
In South Carolina, about one in 13 people say they don’t wear a mask in public, according to a survey by Carnegie Mellon University. The results, from thousands of surveys of Facebook users in all states, have steadily improved over time, but still place South Carolina slightly below the national average.
Reach Mary Katherine Wildeman at 843-607-4312. Follow her on Twitter @mkwildeman.