Florida has nearly half of all known cases in the United States

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. – The Centers for Disease Control says Florida has nearly half of all known cases of a mutated and probably more contagious coronavirus strain in the United States.

The news comes as Florida has once again broken its previous record for coronavirus cases, adding nearly 20,000 infected people on Thursday.

The variant that appeared in Great Britain was detected last week in a 20-year-old man from Martin County.

The CDC says Florida now has 22 cases of the mutant virus. California has 26 cases, Colorado has 2, and New York and Georgia have reported one case each.

The CDC map of cases caused by variants can be viewed by clicking here.

The map does not break down the specific counties or locations in the state where the variant was reported.

Florida broke its record for the largest one-day increase in COVID-19 cases two days in a row, with state health officials reporting an additional 19,816 cases Thursday after 17,783 new cases Wednesday.

Miami-Dade County accounted for 3,373 of the new cases confirmed Thursday in Florida.

The World Health Organization says scientists first detected the British version in September. Doctors are still researching the variant, but it is believed that Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are still effective.

Dr. Aileen Marty, an infectious disease expert at Florida International University, told Local 10 News earlier this week that studies comparing blood from people who recovered from the original strain with the variant show that those who developed antibodies good ones had antibodies that also seem to neutralize the new strain.

“Based on this, we are pretty sure that vaccines today, with the current new version in the UK, will still be very effective,” she said. “We need to do studies with people who have had vaccines to be 100% sure, but they look very, very good since we already know that these vaccines produce better quality immunity than even the fact that they had the virus. . “

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