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The United States must rapidly deploy Covid-19 vaccines and step up surveillance before highly contagious variants take hold or the virus mutates again and further exacerbates the pandemic, CDC director Dr Rochelle Walensky said on Wednesday. .
Three variants first identified in the UK, South Africa and Brazil have worried researchers, according to a research notice she wrote with White House chief medical adviser Dr Anthony Fauci. A CDC study published in January warned that the variant found in the UK, known as B.1.1.7, would likely become the dominant strain circulating in the US by March.
The B.1.1.7 variant has been shown to be highly transmissible, and “preliminary data suggests the possibility of increased disease severity with infection,” wrote Walensky, Fauci and Dr Henry Walke, the Covid incident manager of the CDC, in the published view. Wednesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association, or JAMA.
Walensky told JAMA in a separate interview on Wednesday that the variant is believed to be around 50% more transmissible than previous strains and early data suggests it could be up to 50% more. virulent or fatal.
“Modeling data has shown how a more contagious variant, such as B.1.1.7, has the potential to exacerbate the trajectory of the US pandemic and reverse the current downward trend in new infections and delay further pandemic control, ”Walensky said in the newspaper.
So far, the United States has identified at least 1,277 cases of Covid-19 with variant B.1.1.7 from Great Britain, 19 of the B.1.351 variant, which was discovered in South Africa, and three cases of the P.1 variant found in Brazil, according to recent data from the CDC.
Surveillance for variants in a commercial laboratory in early February suggests that nationwide, the prevalence of variant B.1.1.7 is likely approaching 1%, although the prevalence in some states may exceed 2%, according to the article. .
However, the more the virus circulates and infects other people, the more likely it is to mutate. This is part of the reason why global health experts have urged people to double down on public health measures, such as social distancing, frequent hand washing, and wearing masks, until the vaccines can be deployed and populations can achieve so-called herd immunity.
A faster spreading virus would also mean more people would have to be vaccinated to build an umbrella of immunity, experts said. In the United States, the level of viral spread in the community must be “aggressively lowered” and Americans should postpone travel and avoid crowds to ensure that the variants do not continue to spread, wrote the most. senior federal health officials.
“The more they mutate, the more likely we are to see dominant variants that could really emerge and become a problem for us,” Walensky told JAMA. “So the best thing we can do to avoid these problems in general is to have less disease circulating, less virus circulating.”
Missing monitoring
The nation’s response should not only address the variants found in the UK, South Africa and Brazil, but it should also be ready to detect mutations that may occur nationally, Walensky said.
The country’s infrastructure to perform “genome sequence surveillance” for variants in the United States has so far been under-prepared to detect circulating strains.
The CDC has partnered with public health and commercial laboratories to rapidly scale up genomic sequencing in the country. As of January, the United States was sequencing just 250 samples per week for the variants, which have since grown “to thousands,” Walensky said. However, she added that “we are not where we need to be”.
“It will be a dial, not a switch, and we have to dial it,” Walensky said.
This is a developing story. Please check for updates later.
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