The B117 has been located in 37 countries in all, including the United States in Florida, California and Colorado so far. In response, many countries have issued travel restrictions for airplanes from the United Kingdom.
How much more serious the threat posed by South Africa’s 501Y.V2 is a question that has not yet been definitively answered. John Bell, a professor of medicine at the University of Oxford, told Times Radio (an affiliate of London Times), that both B117 and 501Y.V2 have different mutations; they are not a single mutation. “And the mutations associated with the South African form are really quite substantial changes in the structure of the protein (peak of the virus),” said Bell.
For its part, the World Health Organization (WHO) says for the time being that 501Y.V2 does not appear to be associated with worse symptoms or outcomes, although WHO continues to do research on the variant. According to the WHO, 501Y.V2 has been reported in four other countries.
UK experts like Bell and policy administrators like Health Secretary Matt Hancock can’t get the word out: they are saying that South Africa’s 501Y.V2 variant is much more problematic than the UK’s B117.
“I am extremely concerned about the South African variant and that is why we have taken the steps we have taken to restrict all flights from South Africa,” Hancock told the BBC Today program. “This is a very, very significant problem … and it is even more problematic than the new UK variant.”
These COVID-19 variants reach a point where stressed healthcare systems do everything they can to manage traditional SARS-CoV-2. In the United States yesterday, 125,544 people were hospitalized because of the disease, according to the COVID Screening Project. This is a new record for a day. The number of COVID-related hospitalizations has been in excess of 100,000 per day for a month.
Meanwhile, Johns Hopkins University reports that there were 210,479 new cases of COVID-19 yesterday. In addition, 1,394 people died of the disease yesterday.
In the USA, there have been about 20.7 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 to date in the pandemic. About 352,000 people died of the disease in the United States.
Worldwide, there have been more than 85 million confirmed cases of COVID-19; while more than 1.8 million people died of the disease.
Much hope has been placed on the COVID-19 vaccines, but its launch did not go as planned. Health officials wanted at least 20 million people vaccinated by this point. But according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), there were only about 4.2 million vaccinations.
The CDC claims that more than 13.7 million doses of vaccines have been distributed across the country. That is about 7 million less than the number of doses of COVID vaccine that Operation Warp Speed wanted to administer to this point.
So, what is slowing things down? Well the New York Times this morning points to three obstacles. As noted, the current increase in COVID is adding more burden to an already overburdened healthcare system. In addition, many states that have the vaccines are planning to take them to long-term care institutions first, so distribution is also delayed, according to the times. But as Scott Gottlieb, MD, the former head of the Food and Drug Administration put it in an article he wrote in Wall Street Journal over the weekend: “A vaccine that sits on the shelf for weeks, waiting for its perfect container, does not help to eliminate the pandemic.”
finally the New York Times reports, the holidays meant fewer staff at hospitals and other health institutions to receive and distribute vaccines.