At least 52 cases of a coronavirus variant first identified in the UK have been identified in the United States, according to the CDC on Wednesday.
This includes 26 cases in California, 22 cases in Florida, two cases in Colorado and one case in Georgia and New York.
The CDC says that this does not represent the total number of cases circulating in the USA, but those that were found through positive sample analysis. The agency warns that its numbers, which must be updated on Tuesdays and Thursdays, may not correspond immediately to those of state and local health departments.
Although the variant appears to spread more easily than Covid-19, there is no evidence that it is more deadly or causes more serious illness, according to the CDC.
Experts suspect that there may be many more cases in the United States and have criticized the country for not doing more genetic sequencing of virus samples to monitor mutations. On Sunday, a CDC official told CNN that the agency plans to more than double the number of samples it sequences over the next two weeks – with a target of 6,500 a week.
The first known US sample that carried the current version of the variant was collected on December 19 in Florida, according to the genomic database GISAID. However, collection dates are not available for all samples.