SAN JOSE – A potentially more infectious COVID-19 variant that is spreading more and more throughout California is now “relatively common” in Santa Clara County, where it contributed to the infamous Christmas outbreak in a Kaiser ER and several other outbreaks .
“The variant has been identified in cases from many of these environments, including cases associated with the Kaiser outbreak, outbreaks from specialist wards, cases in prisons and shelters and specimens from test sites in the community,” said the county in a statement sent to this organization. news Monday.
“This suggests that the variant is now relatively common in our community,” added the statement.
On Sunday night, county public health officer, Dr. Sara Cody, joined state and local health officials to announce that the 452R variant was behind several South Bay outbreaks, including one in which at least 74 Kaiser employees and 15 patients were infected in the emergency room at South San Jose hospital.
A hospital receptionist died due to the Kaiser outbreak, which was largely attributed to an employee who paid an unannounced visit to the emergency room to bring some Christmas spirit. She wore an inflatable Christmas tree costume that may have spread the virus because she used air with circulating energy.
Kaiser confirmed the presence of 452R in the outbreak in a statement on Monday, adding that those with a positive test “are past the contagious period and are symptom free.”
At Sunday’s press conference, Santa Clara County officials did not formally link any other outbreaks to the variant, including a series of major outbreaks in county prisons and one affecting the San Jose State University football team before playing and losing one. bowling game at the end of a season of historic success.
Monday’s statement linked the tension to other outbreaks, although not to the football team.
In addition to Santa Clara County, the 452R variant has been detected in Humboldt, Lake, Los Angeles, Mono, Monterey, Orange, Riverside, San Francisco, San Bernardino, San Diego and San Luis Obispo counties.
Cody said more and more of the 452R strain is being detected in South Bay because Santa Clara County is conducting more genomic sequencing than most other California counties.
“We have been looking for more and therefore more discovered,” she said.
News of the spread of the variant arrives as virus trends show some positive signs, with the rise in COVID-19 cases and deaths reported in California on Sunday declining from the previous week. At approximately 39,700 a day, California’s average daily case count dropped by about 11% last week. The state still has an average of 513 fatalities a day – more than one every three minutes – but that is only 7% higher than the previous week, compared with an increase of 43.5% the previous week.
University of Washington scientists who maintain one of the most widely used and respected computer models for tracking and designing outbreaks also say that new infections appear to have peaked last week in the United States and major states, including California.
But the positive assessment is based on public adherence to social detachment, avoiding meetings and continuing to wear masks, as well as the absence of a vaccine-resistant strain of virus and a vastly improved distribution of the vaccine.
Meanwhile, the inoculation effort, which was already difficult, encountered another obstacle after a group of people suffered severe allergic reactions to a batch of Modern vaccines in Southern California, which led to Dr. Erica Pan, the most important epidemiologist state, recommending that clinics put hundreds of thousands of doses on hold.
More than 330,000 doses of that batch were distributed across the state, and Santa Clara County was among several jurisdictions announcing that they were postponing. The county said in a press release that it has no indication that any of the 21,800 doses of the examined batch that ended up with South Bay health care providers has been administered.
Cody said the extent to which the variant factored in the Kaiser outbreak is still being investigated with help from the state’s Department of Public Health and the National Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“This was a very unusual outbreak, with many diseases, and it seemed to spread very quickly,” she said. “We are trying to understand whether the characteristics of this outbreak are due to this variant … or have to do with other factors that are present in this hospital.”
Both Kaiser and public health officials are emphasizing that the increase in the mutated strain does not guarantee the alteration of existing security protocols and practices to avoid hiring COVID-19.
“We have no sign at this point that this variant is associated with anything else, like the increase in the severity of the disease, although we are certainly looking for signs to see if this is emerging,” said Cody.
The latter variant is different from variant B.1.1.7, a more contagious strain first detected in the United Kingdom. Dr. Charles Chiu, a virologist and professor of laboratory medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, noted the “very high attack rate” of the variant that, in some outbreaks under study, led to “80 and 90 percent infection scenarios. cent ”.
Chiu said in an interview late on Sunday that the first case of the variant in California was discovered in May in Alameda County. But from mid-November to the last two weeks of December, the number of COVID-19 cases linked to the strain rose from 3.8% to 25%.
“It is worrying that it could potentially be more infectious,” said Chiu in a subsequent statement, emphasizing the need for further investigation to determine how quickly it can be transmitted.
Team editors Evan Webeck, Lisa M. Krieger, John Woolfolk, Elliott Almond and Julia Prodis Sulek contributed to this report.