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Growing evidence suggests that the most contagious variant of the coronavirus first identified in the UK, which experts say is partly behind an increase in cases in places like Michigan , could already be dominant in the United States.
“I think we’re here,” said William Lee, vice president of science at Helix, a company whose testing has identified a large chunk of variant cases across the country. “But at the end of the day, it’s hard to say for sure,” given the gaps and lags in the data.
Lee is one of the authors of a study published Tuesday in the journal Cell that estimated that the variant, known as B.1.1.7, would cause the majority of Covid-19 cases in the United States by March 19.
According to this study, B.1.1.7 cases are expected to double every week and a half as a percentage of the total coronavirus cases in the country. The study also concluded that the variant had been introduced several times in the United States, starting in late November. The study’s conclusions were based on test data up to February.
Lee said there is strong evidence that the variant is already responsible for a majority of cases in states like Florida, Michigan and Georgia – with a number of others close, like Pennsylvania, Carolina North, Texas and Southern California. However, Helix’s data does not include robust samples from a number of other states, particularly in the Northeast and Midwest regions.
Although officials from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are yet to say whether the variant is dominant, its scientists previously predicted it would be now.
In January, a CDC study predicted that the variant would exhibit “rapid growth in early 2021, becoming the predominant variant in March.” At the time, it was assumed that the variant represented less than 0.5% of cases.
“B.1.1.7, we know from our most recent data, represents about 26% of the virus currently circulating,” CDC director Dr Rochelle Walensky said in a briefing Wednesday. This appears to be based on preliminary data from samples collected in the two weeks leading up to March 13, according to the CDC’s website. “It is starting to become the predominant variant in many parts of the United States,” she added.
A spokesperson for the CDC told CNN on Wednesday that “national prevalence estimates are inherently delayed by a few weeks.” While the variant’s current picture is “unclear,” they said the agency expects to share its projections “in the near future,” based on the mathematical modeling currently underway.
Almost 12,000 cases of the variant have been identified in 49 states, Puerto Rico and Washington, DC, by the CDC. The agency said this does not represent the total number of such cases circulating in the United States, but rather those that were discovered by testing positive samples.
Florida and Michigan lead the country in these raw numbers.
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