SAN JOSE – A potentially more infectious variant of COVID-19, which is spreading more and more in California, is now “relatively common” in Santa Clara County, where it contributed to the infamous Christmas Day outbreak in a Kaiser emergency and several other outbreaks.
“The variant has been identified in cases in many of these settings, including cases associated with the Kaiser outbreak, outbreaks of skilled nurses, cases in prisons and shelters, and specimens from community testing sites,” the county said in a statement sent to this news organization Monday.
“This suggests that the variant is now relatively common in our community,” the statement added.
On Sunday night, County Public Health Officer Dr. Sara Cody joined state officials and other local health officials to announce that the 452R variant was behind several outbreaks in South Bay, including at least 74. of Kaiser employees and 15 patients were infected in the ER of South San Jose Hospital.
A hospital receptionist died of the Kaiser outbreak, which was largely attributed to an employee making an unannounced emergency visit to bring a holiday spirit. She was wearing an inflatable Christmas tree costume that could have spread the virus because it used energy-circulating air.
Kaiser confirmed the presence of 452R in the outbreak in a statement on Monday, adding that those who gave positive results “have now passed their contagious period and have no symptoms.”
At Sunday’s news conference, Santa Clara County officials did not officially link any other outbreaks, including a series of large ones to county prisons and one that affected the San Jose State University football team before it Play and lose a home game at the end of a season of historic success.
Monday’s statement linked the tension to the other outbreaks, though not to the football team.
In addition to Santa Clara County, variant 452R was detected in Humboldt, Lake, Los Angeles, Mono, Monterey, Orange, Riverside, San Francisco, San Bernardino, San Diego and San Luis Obispo counties.
Cody said more and more strain 452R is being detected in South Bay as Santa Clara County performs more genomic sequencing than most other California counties.
“I searched more and therefore found more,” she said.
News of the spread comes as virus trends show some positive signs, the rise in COVID-19 cases and reported deaths in California on Sunday slowed compared to a week ago. With about 39,700 a day, the average daily number of cases in California has dropped by about 11% in the last week. The state averages about 513 deaths a day – more than one every three minutes – but that’s just 7 percent higher than a week ago, up from 43.5 percent a week. precedence.
Scientists at the University of Washington who maintain one of the most widely used and respected computer models for tracking and designing outbreaks also say new infections appear to have peaked in the past week in the U.S. and large states, including California.
But the positive assessment is based on public adherence to social distancing, avoiding gatherings and continuing to wear masks, as well as the absence of a vaccine-resistant virus strain and a much improved vaccine distribution.
Meanwhile, the inoculation effort, which was already rocky, hit another hurdle after a group of people suffered severe allergic reactions to a batch of Moderna vaccines in Southern California, prompting Dr. Erica Pan, the epidemiologist. state-of-the-art, recommend that clinics put hundreds of thousands of doses on hold.
More than 330,000 doses of the batch were distributed throughout the state, and Santa Clara County was among several jurisdictions to announce that they were stopping. The county said in a press release that it has no indication that any of the 21,800 doses in the controlled group that reached South Bay health care providers were administered.
Cody said the extent to which the Kaiser outbreak is still being investigated with the help of the state Department of Public Health and the National Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“It was a very unusual outbreak, with many diseases, and it seemed to spread quite quickly,” she said. “We are trying to understand if the characteristics of this outbreak are due to this variant … or it is related to other factors that are present at this hospital.”
Both Kaiser and public health officials point out that increasing the mutant strain does not justify changing existing safety protocols and practices to avoid contracting COVID-19.
“We have no signs at this time that this variant is associated with anything else, such as the increased severity of the disease, although, of course, we are certainly looking for any signs to see if this would occur,” Cody said.
The latest variant is different from variant B.1.1.7, a more contagious strain detected for the first time in the United Kingdom. Dr. Charles Chiu, a virologist and professor of laboratory medicine at UC San Francisco, noted the “very high attack rate” of the variant, which in some outbreaks studied led to “80 and 90 percent” infection scenarios.
Chiu said in an interview Sunday night that the first case of the California variant was discovered in May in Alameda County. But from mid-November to the last two weeks of December, the number of strain-related cases of COVID-19 increased from 3.8% to 25%.
“It is worrying that it could be more infectious,” Chiu said in a subsequent briefing, stressing the need for further investigations to determine how quickly it can be transmitted.
Staff reporters Evan Webeck, Lisa M. Krieger, John Woolfolk, Elliott Almond and Julia Prodis Sulek contributed to this report.