Coronavirus task force says the ‘US variant’ is baseless, says the CDC

• The White House coronavirus task force shared a report with states saying that a possible “US variant” may be responsible for the increase in the coronavirus.
• The report suggested that the U.S. variant was more transmissible than the original virus, much like the strains reported in the UK and South Africa.
• But the CDC told Business Insider that there is no evidence of a “US variant” and that it could take months to identify whether a single strain is causing an increase in cases.
• Visit the Business Insider home page for more stories.

The White House coronavirus task force sent states a report on Sunday warning that there may be a “US variant” of the coronavirus. The variant may be fueling the unprecedented number of coronavirus cases and deaths in the United States, the report said, according to the media that obtained the document.

The report suggested that this US variant may be more transmissible than the original version of the virus that appeared in China, much like the new strains identified in the United Kingdom (B.1.1.7) and South Africa (B.1.351 ).

But there is no scientific evidence that a more contagious version of the coronavirus originated or started to spread in the United States.

In a statement to Business Insider on Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said: “So far, neither CDC researchers nor analysts have seen the emergence of a particular variant in the United States, as seen with the emergence of B. 1.1.7 in the United Kingdom or B.1.351 in South Africa. “

Human behavior has a big effect on transmission rates

Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times / Getty Images

The task force report, according to CNBC, offered little information about how long ago the new American strain described may have been in circulation, or what mutations were included in its genetic profile.

Scott Gottlieb, former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, told CNBC’s Closing Bell that the task force’s hypothesis about the existence of a U.S. variant is based in part on the fact that the pandemic growth curves in the U.S. and in the UK are similar.

—Meg Tirrell (@megtirrell) January 8, 2021

According to CNN, the task force report said, “This fall / winter wave was almost twice the rate of increase in cases than spring and summer. This acceleration suggests that there may be a US variant that has evolved here, in addition to the UK variant that is already spreading in our communities. “

Given the lack of evidence provided by the task force, frustrated CDC officials tried to get statements about the suspected variant removed from the recent report, but were unsuccessful, according to the New York Times.

Even in the United Kingdom, the variant is not the only reason for the sharp increase in cases.

“Human behavior has a very large effect on transmission – probably much greater than any biological differences in SARS-CoV-2 variants,” Paul Bieniasz, virologist at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, told Business Insider.

The variant reported in the UK has an increased reproductive value, or R0 – the average number of people infected by a sick person. The number is 1.5 instead of 1.1, the World Health Organization announced in December, meaning that 100 patients will infect another 150, not 110, on average.

But mitigation measures, such as social distance and masking, play a large role in the spread of the virus, regardless of its genetic mutations.

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The US is not sequencing enough genomes to detect new variants

Mike Blake / Reuters

To monitor the many versions of the coronavirus that circulate around the world – each separated by a handful of small changes in its genome – the researchers genetically sequence samples of the virus and track changes over time. UK researchers first identified B.1.1.7 in this way in mid-September.

But the United States is behind many countries when it comes to maintaining control over new variants. US researchers genetically sequenced less than 0.01% of coronavirus cases: 2.5 out of 1,000. In total, the US sequenced only 51,000 coronavirus samples, the CDC reported. In the UK, laboratories are sequencing 45 out of 1,000 cases.

Samantha Lee / Business Insider

This is probably the reason why the US missed the introduction of the UK strain and also why it would be difficult to identify a new variant from the USA. The US did not report its first case involving B.1.1.7 until December 29. That was at least three weeks after the strain entered the country, according to Charles Chiu, an infectious disease specialist at the University of California, San Francisco.

So far, more than 50 cases of B.1.1.7 have been confirmed in six states, and all but one of these people had no travel history, suggesting that the strain has been spreading silently for some time.

“It is very likely to be in all states,” Chiu told Business Insider earlier.

Brendan McDermid / Reuters

Even if a possible new US variant was indeed responsible for an increase in cases, finding a connection could take months.

“There is a strong possibility that there are variants in the United States; however, it may take weeks or months to identify whether there is a single variant of the virus that causes COVID-19, fueling the increase in the United States similar to the increase in the United Kingdom” , the CDC told Business Insider in its statement.

Dr. Peter Hotez, vaccine scientist at Baylor College of Medicine, Texas, said in a tweet on Thursday that “there are probably similar local variants in the U.S. as well, but no one is looking.”

“Like everything else in our national public health response, we have little in the way of genome sequencing of the virus,” he added.