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Health Info
Reuters staff
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The United States is closely monitoring the most infectious variant of COVID-19 after British officials warned it could also be more deadly, two senior US health officials said on Saturday, warning that more data was needed.
Officials are a little more worried about a distinct variant from South Africa, although it has yet to be identified among US cases of the novel coronavirus, the director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Francis Collins and Dr Anthony Fauci, President Joe Biden’s top COVID-19 medical adviser, also said.
Collins noted that data from the UK was preliminary and said it was not clear why people with the UK variant were at a higher risk of death, whether due to changes in the virus itself or other external causes such as pressures on the health system.
“Let’s take this as something to watch out for,” he told MSNBC in an interview.
Fauci separately told MSNBC that he needed to see the raw data from the UK before fully assessing the risk of death and that US officials were assessing the impact of the two new strains on the vaccine’s effectiveness.
“These are serious situations that we are monitoring very closely and, if necessary, we will adapt to them,” Fauci said, adding that the vaccines could be changed in the coming months if necessary.
Their comments come as Democratic President Joe Biden takes the helm of the national response to COVID-19, seeking to re-energize the fight against the highly infectious disease and calling for a position of war. In a flurry of action since taking office on Wednesday, Biden unveiled a new U.S. strategic plan to stem the epidemic and signed numerous executive orders to boost vaccines and increase mask use, among other measures.
The United States is the country hardest hit by COVID-19, with 24.70 million cases and 413,775 deaths as of midnight Friday. Over the past week, 3,089 Americans have died from the disease on average, while 20 US states have reported record deaths this month.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson warned on Friday that the British variant was associated with a higher level of mortality.
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned last week that the UK variant, already circulating in at least 10 US states, could become the dominant variant in the US by March. The variant, known as B.1.1.7, is believed to be twice as contagious as the current variant which is circulating across the country.
“At the moment, we’re not alarmed about it,” Collins said, since vaccines still seemed to be effective against this. “We’re a little more concerned with a South African variant.”
Fauci, America’s foremost infectious disease expert, echoed his concerns, calling the data on the South African variant a little more “worrying” even as current vaccines still appeared to protect against both variants.
Scientists said on Wednesday that the South African variant could reduce the effectiveness of current vaccines, which also raises the prospect of reinfection.
Britain has banned travelers from some African countries in an attempt to stop the spread of this strain in the UK and is weighing new restrictions.
Biden has decided to impose a mandatory quarantine for air passengers arriving in the United States, although details have not yet been released. It also requires passengers to the United States to take a negative COVID-19 test starting Tuesday.
Even without a higher risk of death, more contagious variants increase the pressure on officials to vaccinate the population – a campaign that many state and local officials have called slow and chaotic, and one Biden himself committed to improving.
“When you have more cases, you will have more hospitalizations. And when you get more hospitalizations, you’re ultimately going to have more deaths, ”Fauci told reporters at the White House Thursday.
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