“The projection is that in late March, early April,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci, the most contagious British variant of Covid-19 “it will become more dominant than the wild type.
“The fact is that when you have a virus that has the ability to transmit more efficiently than the wild type in the community, sooner or later through the pure viral dynamics it will become more dominant than the wild type” , the country’s leading infectious disease specialist, said at a news conference with other health officials on Friday.
“This is an alert for all of us,” warned Fauci.
“We will continue to see the evolution of mutants. This means that we, as a government, the companies, all of us who are together in this, will have to be agile to be able to readily adjust to make versions of the vaccine that are actually specifically targeted to any mutation that is actually traveling at any time ”, said Fauci.
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Two weeks ago, the Los Angeles Department of Public Health announced that the so-called British variant of Covid-19, known as B.1.1.7, had been identified in the region. B.1.1.7 is considered up to 50% more transmissible than the most widespread form of the virus. The number of LA residents infected with the UK variant was still small, but since the number of daily analyzes of test samples for new variants is also small, it is very difficult to know how common they are. This is a problem.
Then, last week, the California Department of Public Health revealed that another lesser-known strain was circulating in the state as well.
Called CAL.20C, the variant appears to have appeared in the state in July, but only began to spread significantly in November.
According to the New York Times, CAL.20C was found in more than half of California test samples analyzed genomically in mid-January. The number of these samples analyzed, it should be noted, is much smaller than the total number of daily Covid-19 tests in the state. Therein lies another problem.
While California invests billions of dollars to fight the virus and rightly spends a lot of it on vaccine distribution, it is spending very little to identify new variants.
In early January, the state administered more than 30 million Covid-19 tests. Of those tens of millions, only about 7,000 have been genomically analyzed, according to the San Jose Mercury News. It must be said that the nation as a whole is terribly behind in such analyzes. But California – and specifically Los Angeles – is the global epicenter of the pandemic. The need here is more acute.
Eric Vail, director of molecular pathology at Cedars-Sinai, told the Times that CAL.20C may have played a role in the increase in cases that overwhelmed Southern California hospitals earlier this month. “I am quite confident that this is a more infectious strain of the virus,” said Dr. Vail.
But Los Angeles County is genomically analyzing just a few dozen test specimens each day, so it’s hard to know. This averages 81,000 tests per day. (Health officials say they are flagging the most suspect samples for genomic examination.)
Asked about the deadline for this disparity on Friday, LA County Science Director Dr. Paul Simon admitted: “We don’t really have a sense of the prevalence [of new strains], but we don’t think it’s high. As we expand, we hope to have a better idea. I think we are doing everything we can to test as much as possible, but there is no new infusion of resources ”.
According to Mercury News:
Sequencing is expensive. Requires labor. Takes time. And it diverts attention from the most urgent public health needs.
Unlike the United Kingdom, whose national strategy called “genomic surveillance” is administered by a handful of large laboratories, the American effort falls on the tired shoulders of many state and local health departments, which are already stressed by the pandemic. There is no federal funding for a coordinated, real-time effort. And because our healthcare system is fragmented, there is no single channel that provides all positive samples for sequencing.
To be fair, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti and California Governor Gavin Newsom have said repeatedly that they need more help from the federal government, and both are hopeful that this will come from the Biden administration.
In the meantime, the pandemic continues. The numbers in Los Angeles and California have dropped considerably since the peak of early January, but deaths remain close to the all-time high. In the past three days alone, California has recorded more than 2,000 virus-related deaths.
“THE [variant] this is more worrying and can really be problematic is the mutant that is now dominant in South Africa, ”said Fauci on Thursday. “We are already planning and implementing, making a modified version of the vaccine, which could ultimately be targeted specifically at the South African isolate, which is the most problematic of them all,” he said.
The South African variant, called B.1.351, appeared in early October. B.1.351 shares some mutations with B.1.1.7. Cases caused by this variant were first reported in the US on Thursday.
The CDC reports that the South African and another Brazilian variant “appear to spread more easily and quickly than other variants. They may also be less vulnerable to the effects of antibiotic drugs or antibody-rich blood collected from Covid-19 survivors, which help fight the virus. The Washington Post reported on Friday that B.1.351 also appears to be less affected by the one-shot vaccine under development by Johnson & Johnson.
Fauci said that vaccinating “as many people as possible, as quickly as possible” is the best defense against new variants.
“The virus will continue to mutate and mutate for its own selective advantage,” he said. If Covid-19 is prevalent in a community, it is only a matter of time before the virus mutates, as ample “opportunity for adaptation” is given.
“The fundamental principle of vaccinating people as quickly and efficiently as possible will always be the best way to prevent the evolution of any mutant. Because when you do that, you avoid replication, and replication is essential to the mutation. “