The United States assured that the new variant of COVID-19 detected in New York is taken “very seriously”

The Chief Epidemiologist of the United States Government, Anthony Fauci, assured on Monday that he takes very seriously the new variant of COVID-19 detected in New York that experts have traced in a predominantly Dominican neighborhood in upper Manhattan, but he recalled that it has not yet turned out to be more virulent.

“We take the New York variant, 526, very seriously,” Fauci said Monday at a press conference for the White House team tasked with responding to the coronavirus pandemic.

The B.1.526 variant appeared in November and has since spread throughout the Big Apple and now accounts for around 25% of infections., despite the fact that these have started to drop in recent weeks in most of the city.

As detailed by Fauci on Monday, this variant may have originated in the predominantly Hispanic and Dominican Washington Heights neighborhood, and from there it spread to other areas of the city during the holiday season to end. from last year.

Likewise, the epidemiologist has requested that the possibility that the variant may escape the protection of vaccines and antibody treatments be considered, according to recent research. “We have to be really careful with this because of its ability to evade both monoclonal antibodies and to some extent vaccine-induced antibodies,” he said.

Fauci assured that there is still a lot of ignorance in the scientific community about the 526 variant. and it must be “watched very closely”.

The Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Rochelle Walensky, warned that despite the reduction in new daily cases, we must not let our guard down, since “70,000 daily cases may seem few compared to what we had since a few months. there is, but with the extension of the variants, we can lose the gained ground ”.

In addition to variant 526 in New York, health authorities are monitoring extension of variant B.1.1.7, detected in the United Kingdom; B.1.351, detected in South Africa; the P.1 or Brazilian, and one detected in California, known as B.1.427 / 429.

Meanwhile, the vaccination campaign in New York continues to progress rapidly, particularly among the elderly and at-risk groups, including Hispanics and blacks, who have been hardest hit by the pandemic, which in the city has was particularly deadly last spring.

The United States has reached 28,659,234 confirmed cases of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus and 514,320 deaths from the COVID-19 disease., according to the independent count from Johns Hopkins University.

That balance at 8:00 p.m. local time (01:00 GMT Tuesday) is 1,336 more deaths than Sunday and 55,546 new infections.

California is now the state most affected by the pandemic with 52,320 deaths, followed by New York (47,719), Texas (43,758), Florida (30,999), Pennsylvania (23,984), New Jersey (23,273) and Illinois (22,759).

The other states with a large number of deaths are Georgia (17,376), Ohio (17,346), Michigan (16,519), Massachusetts (16,144) or Arizona (15,979).

As for contagions, California has 3,570,965, followed by Texas with 2,659,408, the third is Florida with 1,910,921, New York is fourth at 1,650,303 and Illinois is fifth at 1,187,757.

The provisional death toll -514,320- far exceeds the lower limit of initial White House estimates, which at best projected between 100,000 and 240,000 deaths from the pandemic.

The new president of the United States, Joe Biden, predicted that in total more than 600,000 people in the country will die from the virus.

For its part, the Institute for Health Metrics and Assessments (IHME) at the University of Washington, whose models for predicting the evolution of the pandemic are often set by the White House, estimates that on June 1, some will be dead.

With information from EFE

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