A variant of the coronavirus carrying some of the same mutations as the highly contagious British variant may have been in the United States since October and is already widespread, suggests a reanalysis of more than 2 million tests.
Genome sequencing to confirm that the variant seen in Americans is the same as the so-called B117 variant currently in circulation in the UK is in progress.
The results are expected within a few days, but the revelations have raised new questions about the origin of the altered virus, including a small possibility that it started in the United States, not the United Kingdom or elsewhere. The variant has also been found in at least 17 countries, including South Korea, Spain, Australia and Canada.
“It would be no surprise if at least some of the cases were B117,” said Eric Topol, head of the Scripps Research Translational Institute in La Jolla, California, who was not involved in the research, but whose team confirmed a Californian case of the B117 variant on Wednesday -market.
“He’s probably been here for a while at low levels – but you don’t see him until you look.”
The existence of a new highly transmissible Sars CoV-2 variant was announced by the UK health secretary on December 14, after Covid testing labs reported that an increasing number of their positive samples were missing the sign of one of the three genes from your PCR tests use to confirm the presence of the virus.
Further sequencing revealed that the “loss of the S gene” was the result of mutations in the gene that encodes the spike protein that the virus uses to enter human cells. The variant is believed to have been circulating in the UK since September.
News of the new variant has prompted several countries to restrict travel from the UK – or, in the case of the US, requiring travelers to provide proof of a negative Covid-19 test in order to enter the country. However, the first known cases in the US were detected earlier this week in Colorado and California, and the suspicion is that it may already be widespread.
In the last hours of December 31, a third state of the United States, Florida, officially reported a case of the coronavirus variant, a man in his twenties in Martin County, north of West Palm Beach, who had no history recent travel, the Florida state health department said.
To investigate, scientists at Helix, a California-based DNA testing company, examined the prevalence of abandonment of the S gene in 2 million Covid tests the company has run in recent months. They observed an increase in the abandonment of the S gene among positive samples since the beginning of October, when 0.25% of positive tests exhibited this pattern.
It has since grown to an average of 0.5% last week – although in Massachusetts, which has the largest number of such samples, it is currently at 1.85%, although no case of the B117 variant has been announced in that state.
Further analysis revealed mutations in some of the same regions of the S gene that are also present in the B117 variant – although complete sequencing of the viral genome is needed to confirm whether it is in fact the same variant or something else.
The coronavirus pandemic is out of control in the United States, with the 24-hour death toll of more than 3,740 earlier this week, signifying the worst outbreak day in the country so far.
Public health experts and Joe Biden, the Democratic president-elect, have warned that the situation will get worse before it gets better, even with the arrival of vaccines.
Helix is currently working with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), pending the results of testing the variant found in the USA.
“If we see the [B117 variant], so we may be able to check whether it has been introduced to the United States once or several times, or whether it has undergone further mutation, ”said Nicole Washington, associate director of research at Helix, whose research has been published as a preprint and has not yet been reviewed. in pairs.
“If all the samples have it, then it has probably been here for some time, but if only one or two samples have it, then it may have been introduced recently and we are just at the beginning of seeing it spread.”
It is also possible that the variant originated in the United States and then spread to the United Kingdom – although this is unlikely, since the B117 variant appears to be more prevalent in England, said Topol. “However, I don’t think it should be known as the UK variant, because we don’t know where it came from.”
If B117 is really widely established in the United States, then travel bans are unlikely to work, added Topol: “The variant is likely to become dominant [within the US] in the coming months, then what we need to do is to overcome it through a combination of really strict mitigation measures, including surveillance and testing, and vaccination as if there is no tomorrow, ”he said. “Vaccines must work well.”
Even though the variant Helix identified is not B117, the nature of some of the mutations it contains are worrying, because they can increase the virus’s ability to infect human cells, added Ravi Gupta, professor of clinical microbiology at the University of Cambridge, UK , which helped to sequence the B117 variant.
Meanwhile, the U.S. fell far short of the goals set by the U.S. government for the number of people it expected to be vaccinated by the end of 2020.
US leading infectious disease specialist Anthony Fauci on Thursday asked the federal government to use more resources to vaccinate Americans.
As overworked and underfunded state public health departments struggled to administer vaccines, some seniors waited overnight to receive their first dose in Florida.
“We would like to see everything go well and have 20 million doses in people … by the end of 2020, which was the projection. It obviously didn’t happen, and that’s disappointing, ”Fauci told NBC on Thursday.