“I know these variants are worrying, especially since we are seeing signs of progress,” said Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, during a meeting at the White House on Wednesday. “I am talking about them today because I am also concerned.
“The continued spread of more communicable variants could hamper the progress we made last month, if we let our guard down.”
The new study, published in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, described people aged between 15 and 41, whose samples were collected from mid-December to mid-January; five reported symptoms similar to those of Covid-19 and three were asymptomatic.
Among the eight people, three had a history of international travel in the two weeks before they fell ill, including two who traveled to West Africa and one who traveled to the Dominican Republic, and three others traveled to California. One person was exposed to the virus at home and another in the community. None of them had a history of travel to the UK.
Variant identification in Minnesota “highlights the importance of mitigation measures, such as wearing a mask, physical distance, avoiding crowds and poorly ventilated indoor spaces, isolating people with diagnosed COVID-19, quarantining close contacts of people with COVID-19, and adherence to CDC travel guidelines, “says the report.
During the White House briefing, Walensky said it was “more important than ever that we do everything in our power to slow the spread.”
“Fewer cases means fewer opportunities for variants to spread and less opportunities for new variants to emerge,” she said.
On Tuesday, the CDC reported at least 1,299 cases of coronavirus strains first detected in the United Kingdom, South Africa and Brazil were reported in the United States. The vast majority of these cases, 1,277, are variant B.1.1.7 originally detected in the United Kingdom. This variant was found in 41 states and in Washington, DC. Approximately one third is in Florida.
Nineteen of these 1,299 are variant B.1.351 first identified in South Africa. The P.1 strain initially linked to Brazil was discovered between two cases in Minnesota and one in Oklahoma.
These numbers do not represent the total number of these cases circulating in the United States, but only those found by analyzing positive samples.
The rapid increase in cases ‘is not inevitable’
Variant B.1.351 may also be circulating in other parts of southern Africa, where many countries reported rapid increases in the number of Covid-19 cases in December and January, the report said.
“The spread of variant B.1.351 is a public health concern because of the potential for increased transmissibility and, therefore, increased cases, hospitalizations and deaths,” wrote the researchers.
“The possibility of a similar experience in the United States is a real threat,” wrote Walensky and his co-authors in the medical journal JAMA. “However, such a result is not inevitable; the USA and other countries have the ability to prevent this result from occurring with a strong and immediate public health response. ”
They note that the United States Department of Health and Human Services Interactivity Group SARS-CoV-2 was developed to increase coordination between agencies, including to quickly identify and monitor the variants of concern. The agencies are evaluating the tests, studying reinfection and evaluating therapy. They continue to study how vaccines are affected by the variants and to research “revolutionary” infections that occur after vaccination.
Although Covid-19 cases in the United States are falling, they said that reducing transmission is critical, as is accelerated vaccination.
There is also an impulse to increase surveillance of genome sequencing in the United States – state health departments are handling 750 samples a week, and the CDC is now hiring commercial laboratories to “significantly increase” surveillance for more than 6,000 samples per week.
“A concerted and well-coordinated public health effort, coupled with the rapid and widespread absorption of effective vaccines, is essential to stay ahead of the inevitable evolution of variants that can dangerously accelerate the path of the pandemic,” wrote Walensky and his co-authors.