Dr. Peter Hotez, co-director of the Vaccine Development Center at Texas Children’s Hospital, says the United States is “on a difficult journey” as new variants of Covid spread across the country.
“Because they are more transmissible, this means that more Americans will be infected, so while we have a slight decrease in the number of new cases … the expectation now, it will increase again because of these new variants,” said Hotez in an interview. Thursday night on “The News with Shepard Smith”. “More people will be infected, they will start to overload the hospital systems again and, possibly, the mortality rate will start to increase, both by a combination of more new cases in general, and they may also have slightly higher mortality rates just by the variant by nature of the variant. “
Health officials in South Carolina have confirmed two cases of the dangerous and highly transmissible South African strain of Covid. The authorities said the cases do not appear to be related and are not related to any recent travel. Dr. Zeke Emanuel, a member of President Joe Biden’s Covid Advisory Board, said that is why the South African variety is so worrying.
“This is worrying because these two individuals have no evidence of travel, which means that the South Africa variant, which is even more worrying than the British variant, is about and in the community,” said Emanuel.
Hotez told host Shep Smith that the new strains are even more problematic because “we haven’t been looking for them.”
“We have had a very low performance in genomic sequencing, which is how we take these variants from the UK, South Africa and Brazil, so we know they are in South Carolina, but they could be elsewhere,” said the dean of National Baylor College of Medicine School of Tropical Medicine.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have warned that the UK variant, also known as B117, may be dominant in the United States in the spring. Hotez said the key to protecting the population is to vaccinate people at a faster rate.
“The bottom line is that we will have to find a way to vaccinate the American people faster than current projections,” said Hotez. “One, to reduce hospitalization and death, but also to anticipate these variants. If we can vaccinate three-quarters of the American population, we can stop transmission and prevent some of these new variants from becoming dominant.”