CDC Headquarters in Atlanta
Elijah Nouvelage | Bloomberg via Getty Images
Staff at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Wednesday that a new strain of Covid-19 now circulating in the United States could cause even more stress in hospitals that are already overwhelmed with coronavirus patients.
Colorado health officials announced on Tuesday that they had detected the first known case of the new and more infectious strain of the virus, initially discovered in the United Kingdom. A second new separate strain first identified in South Africa may also already be circulating in the United States, CDC officials said.
“As the variants spread more quickly, they can lead to more cases and put even more pressure on our already overburdened healthcare systems,” said Dr. Henry Walke, the agency’s incident manager in Covid, in a conference call with reporters.
Walke said the available data indicates that the new variant spreads “easier and faster than other strains”, but it does not appear to cause more serious illness or increase the risk of death.
He noted that the individual in Colorado who was infected with the new strain of the virus did not have a travel history, “which suggests that this variant was passed from person to person in the United States.” He added that, considering how widely the variant has spread across the UK, her arrival in the US “was expected”.
“Viruses are constantly changing through mutations and we hope to see new variants appear over time,” he said. “Many mutations lead to variants that don’t change the way the virus infects people. Sometimes, however, there are variants that can spread more easily, like these.”
He added that “experts believe that our current vaccines will be effective against” both new strains. Scientists are still studying how the new strains respond to treatments with Covid-19, such as monoclonal antibodies and convalescent plasma.
Dr. Greg Armstrong, director of the CDC’s Office of Advanced Molecular Detection, said the claim that vaccines will be effective against the new variant is based on “experience with similar previous mutations.” He added that immunity induced by previous infection from a different strain is also likely to be effective against these new strains.
National and state laboratories across the country are conducting tests to determine whether other variants are present in the United States and how widely the variant discovered in the United Kingdom is spreading. He said the CDC is accelerating the national surveillance program to receive 750 samples per week for sequencing.
He added that the agency is hiring academic centers across the country to sequence samples and search for new variants locally. These centers, he said, are in Boston, New Haven, Connecticut, Athens, Georgia, Nashville, Tennessee, Madison, Wisconsin and the Scripps Institute in San Diego.
“There are many laboratories with this capability in the United States,” he said of testing the new variant. “Many of them are looking for this variant now.”