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A variant first identified in Britain, known as B.1.1.7, is also found in the US, and modeling indicates it could worsen the already terrible spread of the virus across the country , the CDC researchers said.
This means that people need to put more effort into wearing masks, avoiding gatherings, and staying socially distant from each other.
“This means that it will be more and more difficult to control it. All of these steps we will have to take to a greater degree, including vaccination,” Dr Gregory Armstrong, who heads the Office of Advanced Molecular Detection at La CDC’s respiratory disease division, told CNN.
“Multiple sources of evidence indicate that B.1.1.7 is transmitted more efficiently than other variants of SARS-CoV-2,” Armstrong and colleagues wrote in the agency’s weekly report, MMWR.
“Variant B.1.1.7 has the potential to increase the trajectory of the US pandemic in the months to come.”
Efforts to vaccinate people – already slower than the federal government had hoped and promised – must be stepped up, the CDC said.
“Higher vaccine coverage may be needed to protect the public,” the researchers wrote.
The virus has already infected more people in the United States and killed more than in any other country. As of Friday afternoon, according to Johns Hopkins University, the virus had been diagnosed in 23 million people in the United States and killed more than 390,000 people.
The B.1.1.7 variant appears to infect human cells more easily, which would help it infect more people.
It has been detected in a dozen US states, but the CDC also knows that surveillance is poor and is likely much more common than that. It is also possible that the pattern of mutations that makes the virus more transmissible occurs independently as it circulates among people, because the more people who are infected, the more likely the virus is to mutate.
The CDC team ran an experimental model to see what might happen in the near future. It is not known how much more transmissible B.1.1.7 is, nor is it known how much immunity already exists in the U.S. population due to past infections, so the team made some speculations. In one scenario, the new variant is 50% more infectious than the currently dominant variants in circulation.
“In this model, the prevalence of B.1.1.7 is initially low, but because it is more transmissible than the current variants, it shows rapid growth in early 2021, becoming the predominant variant in March,” wrote the CDC team.
“If it behaves like it has so far in the UK, Denmark and Ireland, yes it is going to become a growing proportion of all cases no matter what we do,” Armstrong said.
“That’s not to say the cases are necessarily going to increase,” Armstrong added. “It doesn’t mean that we can’t do anything.”
The new variant does not appear to result in higher hospitalization rates or higher death rates, he noted.
“While there is a high probability that this will become an increasingly larger proportion of all cases, if we can get people to adhere more to the recommended measures, the number of cases does not need to increase. “Armstrong told me.
Plus, the CDC needs to do more to keep tabs on new variations and how they look.
“The CDC has also contracted with several large commercial clinical labs to rapidly sequence tens of thousands of SARS-CoV-2 positive samples each month and funded seven academic institutions to conduct genomic surveillance in partnership.” with public health agencies, thus adding significantly to the availability of timely genomic surveillance data across the United States, ”the team wrote.
The CDC is also keeping an eye out for a variant first spotted in South Africa and now called B.1.351, plus one spotted among four travelers from Brazil when they landed in Japan, called B.1.1.28
“These variants carry a constellation of genetic mutations,” the CDC team wrote.
Concerns are that the virus could change in ways that help it evade immunity induced by vaccination or immunity introduced with antibody treatments. The new coronavirus vaccines are designed to be quick and easy to change to match the new strains in circulation, but a major change would mean people would have to be revaccinated.
It’s also possible that some of the changes make the virus more difficult to detect in standard tests.
And the CDC is also concerned that if the virus changes the right way, it could re-infect people who have already recovered from the coronavirus. The flu already does.
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