Dr. Rochelle Walensky, who was selected to serve as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, speaks during an event at The Queen Theater in Wilmington, Del., Tuesday, December 8, 2020.
Susan Walsh | AP
The United States needs to rapidly deploy Covid-19 vaccines and increase its surveillance before highly contagious variants set in or the virus mutates again and makes the pandemic even worse, said CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky on Wednesday .
Three variants identified for the first time in the UK, South Africa and Brazil caused some concern for researchers, according to a research opinion she wrote with the White House chief medical advisor, Dr. Anthony Fauci. A CDC study published in January warned that the variant found in the UK, known as B.1.1.7, is likely to become the dominant strain in circulation in the United States in March.
Variant B.1.1.7 proved to be highly transmissible and “preliminary data suggests the possibility of an increased severity of the disease with infection”, wrote Walensky, Fauci and Dr. Henry Walke, Covid Incident Manager at CDC in the published view Wednesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association, or JAMA.
Walensky told JAMA in a separate interview on Wednesday that the variant is believed to be about 50% more transmissible than previous strains and initial data suggests it may be up to 50% more deadly.
“The modeling data illustrated how a more contagious variant, such as B.1.1.7, has the potential to exacerbate the path of the pandemic in the United States and reverse the current downward trend in new infections and further delay pandemic control” , Walensky said in the newspaper.
This is a developing story. Please check back later for updates.