Brett Giroir, deputy secretary for health and human services, said Monday that a new, faster-spreading coronavirus strain found for the first time in the United Kingdom is “probably” already present in the United States, although he warned officials have no evidence of his presence.
In an interview with Good Morning America, Giroir warned that authorities suspect that the new mutation in the virus has already made the leap from Britain to North America, despite the fact that the United States and more than a dozen other countries have implemented restrictions. travel.
“We have no evidence that he is here, but we suspect he is probably here, given the global interconnection,” Giroir said. “We have no evidence that he is here. He is certainly not widespread here, but we must look and make sure he is not here.”
“And we still believe – we have no absolute evidence – but we have very good evidence and we believe that vaccines will continue to be effective,” Giroir added.
Giroir went on to say that although the new strain of COVID-19 is believed to be spreading at a faster rate, there is “no evidence that it is more serious” than the version that has been spreading in the US for months.
His comments echo those of former Food and Drug Administration spokesman Scott Gottlieb, who told CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday that the new strain of COVID-19 is “probably here in the United States” in a “reasonable” number. ” of people.
“We don’t sequence a lot of samples in this country and a lot of sequencing that is done is done in private labs and not aggregated in public databases. This needs to be fixed,” Gottlieb said of testing issues that have complicated US efforts to pursue the new strain. “In the UK, it sequences about 10% of all samples. Here we do a fraction of 1%.”
Officials in Canada revealed on Saturday that they had detected two cases of the new COVID-19 strain, which appeared in a couple with no known history of travel or exposure to the virus.
The United States passed a total of 19 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 on Sunday, while more than 320,000 died from the virus across the country.