Health officials detected a case of the Brazilian variant of the coronavirus in a New York resident for the first time last week. In a press release released on Saturday, officials said the patient is a Brooklyn resident in his 90s with no travel history, and that work is underway to learn more about the patient and any potential contacts.
The strain was first identified by scientists at Mount Sinai hospital and later verified by the Department of Health’s Wadsworth Center Laboratories.
“This is a race between the vaccine and the variants, and we continue to make tremendous progress in bringing vaccines into the arms of eligible New Yorkers,” said Howard Zucker, the state’s health commissioner, in a statement. “In the meantime, we remind New Yorkers to do everything they can to protect themselves and their neighbors, while we continue to manage this pandemic.”
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The guidance echoes that of Dr. Anthony Fauci, who also said that the best defense against emerging variants in the United States is to vaccinate as many people as quickly as possible. The P.1 variant is less widespread in the US than other mutations, such as the UKB1.1.7 variant, which experts predict will become the dominant strain by the end of the month.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report that at least 54 cases of P.1. variants have been reported in 18 U.S. jurisdictions. In comparison, there were 6,390 occurrences of variant B.1.1.7 in 51 jurisdictions.
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Although the P.1 variant was determined to be more transmissible than the wild-type coronavirus, the University of Oxford said last week that new findings showed that it poses less of a threat to the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine and to the one developed by Pfizer and BioNTech than previously thought.