The first confirmed case in the United States of the highly contagious Covid-19 variant that made its debut in the United Kingdom is a member of the Colorado National Guard who was sent to a nursing home dealing with a coronavirus outbreak, state officials said Wednesday. market.
A second member of the six-person National Guard contingent sent to the Good Samaritan Society’s facilities in Simla city is also suspected of contracting the variant, Colorado state epidemiologist Dr. Rachel Herlihy said during a virtual update. .
“We have a confirmed case and a possible variant in the state,” she said. “And we deployed a team on the premises.”
They were part of a contingent of six members of the National Guard who arrived on December 23 at the facility about 45 miles northeast of Colorado Springs, said Herlihy. Their infections were discovered after they were tested on Christmas Eve.
“In Simla, they were deployed to help deal with staff shortages after an outbreak that affected 100% of the facility’s residents,” said Colorado Governor Jared Polis.
Now, the two patients, neither of whom lives in Simla, are isolated, as contact trackers are trying to determine where, when and how they were infected with the variant, said Herlihy.
None of the patients, who were previously identified as men by Elbert County Health Director Dwayne Smith, have a recent history of traveling abroad, said Herlihy.
In other news about the coronavirus:
- The Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed blamed everything from snowstorms to general inexperience for the slower-than-expected launch of Covid-19 vaccines.
- A new Covid-19 vaccine made by British pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca in collaboration with the University of Oxford has received regulatory approval in the United Kingdom.
- Americans in Wuhan, the Chinese city where the first cases of Covid-19 were detected, told NBC News that they are most frightened by how the pandemic is spreading in the United States.
- A partygoer at a Republican holiday party in New York that became infamous after a viral video showed unmasked partygoers dancing in a conga queue picked up a box of Covid-19. “I wasn’t in the conga line. I ate alone,” James Trent, president of the Queens Village Republican Club affiliate, told The Queens Daily Eagle. “I don’t know how I got it.
- Two mega-churches in New Mexico were hit with heavy fines for violating the state’s pandemic protocols.
- Home stay requests have been extended in California amid an increase in new cases and deaths from coronavirus.
- Most Hollywood productions will remain on a hiatus until mid-January because of an increase in Covid-19 cases in Los Angeles, the union of professional film and television actors told its members.
- One of America’s favorite castaways, actress Dawn Wells, who played Mary Ann on the 1960s sitcom “Gilligan’s Island”, died of Covid-19, her spokeswoman said. She was 82 years old.
Meanwhile, California Governor Gavin Newsom announced on Wednesday that the Covid-19 variant had been detected somewhere in Southern California.
The mutation detected in Colorado and California has also been identified in more than a dozen countries, including France, Denmark, Japan, South Korea and Canada.
But since there is no broad effort in the United States to conduct regular genome sequencing of samples from across the country, it is likely that the variant is already spreading here, Dr. Diane Griffin, professor of molecular microbiology and immunology at the School Johns Hopkins Bloomberg of Public Health, told NBC News on Tuesday.
The silver lining? The Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca vaccines for Covid-19 must be effective against the new variant.
“Our assumption by all scientists is that the vaccine response must be appropriate for this virus,” said Patrick Vallance, the UK government’s chief scientific adviser, earlier this month.
Nearly 19.7 million cases of Covid-19 have been reported in the United States since the pandemic began and the virus has claimed more than 341,000 lives, according to the latest data from NBC News.
Housed in what was once a local hospital and home to around 25 residents, the Good Samaritan Society facility in Simla is in the midst of an outbreak of cases from Covid-19 and so far there have been two confirmed deaths from coronavirus, one out of 93 old man and an 88-year-old woman, officials said.
The facility primarily caters to people on the eastern Colorado plains and peaked in 2009 in a US News & World Report survey of 15,500 nursing homes across the country.
But in May, state health department inspectors noted that the facility “failed to establish and maintain an infection control program”, although it rated the potential level of harm to residents to be minimal.
And in an unrelated case in November, the facility and its managers were charged in a civil negligence lawsuit in connection with the death of a 74-year-old resident who wandered in her motorized wheelchair and fell into a drainage ditch. next.
