Assistant Secretary for Health and Human Services, Brett Giroir, said on Monday that a new, more rapidly spreading coronavirus strain first found in the UK “probably” is already present in the United States, although he warned that authorities still have no evidence of their presence.
In an interview with “Good Morning America”, Giroir warned that officials suspect the new virus mutation has already jumped from the UK to North America, despite the United States and more than a dozen other countries implementing travel restrictions.
“We have no evidence that it is here, but we suspect it is probably here, given the global interconnection,” said Giroir. “We have no evidence that it is here. It is certainly not scattered here, but we need to look and make sure it is not here.”
“And we still believe – we have no absolute evidence – but we have very good evidence and a good belief that vaccines will still be effective,” added Giroir.
Giroir went on to say that while the new strain of COVID-19 is believed to spread at a faster rate, there is “no evidence that it is more serious” than the version that has been spreading in the United States for months.
His comments echoed those of former Food and Drug Administration chief Scott Gottlieb, who told CBS’s “Face the Nation” program on Sunday that the new strain of COVID-19 is “probably here in the United States” in a number ” reasonable “of people.
“We do not sequence many samples in this country, and much of that sequencing that is done is done in private laboratories and is not aggregated in public databases. This needs to be fixed,” said Gottlieb on the testing issues that have complicated US efforts to track the new variety. “In the UK, they are sequencing about 10% of all samples. Here, we are doing a fraction of 1%.”
Canadian officials revealed on Saturday that they had detected two cases of the new strain COVID-19, which appeared in a couple with no travel history or exposure to the virus.
The United States surpassed 19 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 on Sunday, while more than 320,000 died of the virus across the country.