CHICAGO – The British variant of the coronavirus was found in Chicago, health officials announced on Friday.
This variant appears to spread more easily than other forms of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19, which has worried health officials. But state and city leaders emphasized that the UK variant does not appear to cause more serious cases of COVID-19, and vaccines appear to be effective in preventing it.
People can protect themselves as they did during the pandemic: distancing themselves socially, wearing masks and staying at home, officials said.
The variant was first found in the United States two weeks ago, when someone in Colorado fell ill with the virus. It has been found in other states – including near Indiana and Minnesota – since then, and officials said they thought it was likely in Illinois, but it just hadn’t appeared in the samples yet.
“This news is not surprising and does not change our orientation on COVID-19. We need to redouble the recommended security strategies that we know help to prevent the spread of this virus, ”said Dr. Allison Arwady, head of the Chicago Department of Public Health, in a press release. “To protect Chicago, please continue to wear a mask, practice social detachment, wash your hands frequently, have no outside guests at your home, and be vaccinated when it’s your turn.”
The Chicago variant was identified at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, which has been studying positive test samples for COVID-19, according to the city’s health department.
The person who was confirmed sick with the UK strain traveled to the UK and the Middle East two weeks before being diagnosed.
The city health department is identifying people who had close contact with that person and is “reinforcing[ing] the importance of adhering to quarantine and isolation measures ”, according to the city.
The city health department is monitoring the strain, as well as the state health department and the Federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Mutations in the virus are not surprising, necessarily bad or even rare, said Arwady earlier: Experts expect to see about one mutation every two weeks with SARS-CoV-2. Hospitals in Chicago and around the world regularly do genetic sequencing of strains of SARS-CoV-2 found in patients to look for mutations and share the results in a public database, Arwady said.
Since vaccines already approved are believed to work against the variant and spread in the same way as other forms of the virus, city officials are not changing the way they are responding to the pandemic for now, Arwady said earlier.
But the variant spread quickly in the UK, forcing the country to return to the blockade.
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