To date, health experts have identified at least three variants of the coronavirus, identified by the countries from which they appeared to originate: the United Kingdom, South Africa and Brazil.
Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told Wolf Blitzer of CNN that health experts in South Africa realized that the variant has such a high rate of reinfection that previous infections do not seem to protect people.
Even though current vaccines do not offer the same level of protection against variants, they can protect against serious illnesses, including hospitalization and death, said Fauci. They can also prevent variants from becoming more dominant.
“Viruses cannot mutate if they don’t replicate. And if you stop replicating by vaccinating widely and not giving the virus an open playing field to continue to respond to the pressures you put on it, you won’t have mutations,” said Fauci . said at a virtual press conference with the White House’s Covid-19 response team.
“You need to be vaccinated when it is available as quickly and quickly as possible across the country.”
More transmissible variants spread across the USA
The variant identified in the UK has already reached several US states.
On Monday, the Iowa Department of Health said three cases were identified. The authorities contacted the infected people to monitor their health and to notify the people with whom they were in close contact.
“State and local public health officials are conducting additional epidemiological investigations to gather more details about diseases, travel history and potential exposures,” IDPH spokeswoman Sarah Ekstrand told CNN.
Georgia officials have identified 19 cases in the Atlanta metropolitan area, the Department of Health said on Monday. The cases occur among people aged 15 to 61 years.
The first known case of the variant in South Carolina was identified in an adult from the Lowcountry region who traveled internationally, the agency said in a statement on Saturday.
And while Covid-19 cases have steadily declined in Colorado, the state has identified 13 cases of the UK strain, Colorado epidemiologist Dr. Rachel Herlihy told reporters during a Zoom news conference.
The state is “working hard” to make the distribution of a virus vaccine fair and transparent, said Brigadier General Scott Sherman of the Colorado National Guard.
32 million doses of vaccine administered in the USA
The distribution and administration of vaccines has been slow, but the authorities hope to accelerate the rate at which doses are sent to the states and into the arms of the people to deal with the pandemic and the growing variants.
So far, more than 32 million doses of the Covid-19 vaccine have been administered in the United States, with 26 million people receiving at least one dose and nearly 6 million being fully vaccinated, according to data published Monday by the Control Centers. of US Diseases and Prevention.
Both Michigan and North Carolina administered more than one million doses of vaccines, officials said.
“Achieving this milestone is good news for our families, frontline workers and small business owners, but there is more work to be done,” said Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. “My government is working closely with the federal government to help us get the supply we need to reach our goal and return to the normalcy we all yearn for. I ask Michiganders for patience while our frontline employees work 24 hours a day. day to administer vaccines. “
“We have long planned that most Minnesota residents will be vaccinated in the places where they are used to receiving health care,” Walz said in a press release. “But not everyone has a doctor or pharmacy that they are familiar with. That is why we have built a reliable network in different ways in which Minnesotans can access the vaccine ”.
People previously infected with Covid-19 may need only one dose of vaccine, study suggests
Those who have already been infected with the coronavirus and hope to avoid reinfection may need only one dose of the vaccine, instead of the two administered to most, according to a study published on Monday.
People who were previously infected with the virus tend to have levels of antibodies equal to or higher than people who received both doses, but were never infected, as well as more widespread side effects after the first dose, wrote the study authors, who has been peer reviewed.
The authors argue that “changing the policy to give these individuals just one dose of the vaccine would not have a negative impact on antibody titers, saving them from unnecessary pain and releasing many necessary doses of vaccine urgently.”
“Follow-up studies in progress will show whether these initial differences in immune responses are maintained over time,” they wrote.
The CDC says that people should be vaccinated even if they have Covid-19, as it is not yet clear how long the protection of antibodies lasts.
CNN’s Andrea Diaz, Deidre McPhillips, Christina Maxouris, Keith Allen, Gisela Crespo, Laurie Ure, Rebekah Riess, Amanda Sealy and Michael Nedelman contributed to this report