The potentially more contagious new coronavirus strain that caused concern in Europe has been detected in Big Bear, bringing the total number of such cases in California to at least six, officials announced on Friday.
The variant was found in two members of the same household who were tested for the virus on December 20, the San Bernardino County Department of Public Health said in a press release. One of them had contact with a traveler who returned from Britain on December 11 and started showing symptoms of COVID-19 three days later, officials said.
An investigation is still ongoing to determine whether the traveler, also a resident of the Big Bear area, also had the variant or had infected others, county officials said on Saturday. Four other cases were identified this week in San Diego County.
The United States now requires travelers to provide proof of a negative coronavirus test before flying from the UK, but the rule did not take effect until Monday.
This happened after news of the strain, known as B.1.1.7, was announced in England before Christmas and then confirmed in the United States for the first time on Tuesday in Colorado. Florida also reported a case.
Experts say there is no evidence that the variant is more deadly, causes more serious illnesses or makes existing vaccines ineffective.
Still, a distinct set of genetic changes seems to make the virus easier to transmit from person to person and improve its ability to sneak through immune system defenses, raising concerns that it may cause new cases to arise even more quickly due to slow release of vaccination. to get underway and many hospitals are already overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients.
“Based on the information currently available, we know that the variant B.1.1.7 strain appears to spread more easily and quickly,” said Dr. Michael Sequeira, San Bernardino County health officer, in a statement. “Therefore, following all safety practices is more important than ever.”
Scientists are still unsure how prevalent the variant is in the United States, but there is evidence that it may already be spreading in some communities.
The first case in the United States, a Colorado national guard in his 20s who was sent to help a Simla nursing home deal with an outbreak, did not travel abroad, officials said. A second member of the Guard was also suspected of having the variant, according to authorities.
On Wednesday, authorities announced that the variant was first identified in California, in a San Diego County man in his 30s who also had no recent travel history. Tests were pending to determine whether one of the man’s home contacts had the variant after the person was hospitalized with COVID-19, officials said.
The next day, county public health officials said they believed the strain was widespread in the area: sequencing the complete genome had confirmed three more cases in men who had not had contact with each other.
The men – two in their 40s and one in their 50s – also had no interaction with the first confirmed case. Two of them had not traveled abroad; the third has not yet been fully interviewed, officials said.
In all, the four cases of the variant have been detected in communities spread across San Diego County: La Mesa, Mission Beach, Otay Mesa and the Carmel Mountain area, suggesting that it has already settled in the region, officials said.
“We believe that many more cases of strain B.1.1.7 will be confirmed in the coming days and weeks,” said Dr. Eric McDonald, county public health officer, in a statement.
Authorities have yet to find evidence of the variant in Los Angeles County, the state’s most populous county and the one most hit by the virus. But that does not mean it is not circulating, warned Director of Public Health Barbara Ferrer.
“We have thousands and thousands of people being tested every day, and we are able to just sample a small number of test results and do the gene sequencing,” said Ferrer during a briefing earlier in the week.
On Thursday, Florida became the third state to announce that it had identified the variant, in a man in Martin County in his 20s who had not recently traveled.
Experts say the development is no surprise: viruses tend to mutate the more they replicate. Most mutations have no effect on how the virus works, but they can sometimes change the behavior of the virus.
In this case, the changes may have made the virus up to 70% more transmissible, fueling a rapid spread of new cases in London and southern England, Prime Minister Boris Johnson said last month when announcing new blocking measures largely from the country. The discovery also led other countries to restrict or ban travel from Britain.
Some scientists, however, are skeptical that genetic changes in the strain make it more contagious and say more studies are needed to determine whether other factors, such as population density, different rates of mask use and varying compliance with distance rules could explain the rapid spread of the variant in England.
(Team editors Melissa Healey, Rong-Gong Lin II and Luke Money contributed to this report.)
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