Health care workers at the Medical University of South Carolina are administering free Covid-19 tests in a parking lot between Edmund’s Oast and Butcher & Bee restaurants in Charleston, South Carolina, USA, on Wednesday, January 13, 2021.
Micah Green | Bloomberg | Getty Images
The first Covid-19 cases in the US of a new highly contagious virus strain first found in South Africa were detected in South Carolina, the state health department said on Thursday.
The South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control said the strain, known as B.1.351, was found in two adults with no history of travel or connection to each other. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention notified health officials in South Carolina late Wednesday that a sample that was tested at LabCorp was variant B.1.351, the health department said Thursday.
The state’s public health laboratory later identified a separate case of the same variant in a sample tested Monday, the South Carolina Department of Health said in a statement. While the strain appears to be highly transmissible, it does not appear to make people sick, the health department said.
“The arrival of the SARS-CoV-2 variant in our state is an important reminder to all South Carolina residents that the fight against this deadly virus is far from over,” Dr. Brannon Traxler, the department’s interim director, said in a statement. .
The mutated strains of the coronavirus have migrated to the United States in recent weeks. Minnesota health officials on Monday identified the first U.S. case of a similar variant that was first detected in Brazil. The United States has also identified more than 300 cases with another strain first found in the United Kingdom, known as B.1.1.7, according to recent CDC data.
The emergence of these new strains did not come as a surprise to scientists. The United States is quickly trying to step up surveillance efforts to track new strains through genomic sequencing, which could come from abroad or “come from its own country,” said Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the new CDC director, last week.
“The CDC is early in its efforts to understand this and will continue to provide updates as we learn more,” the health agency said in a statement. “The CDC’s recommendations for slowing down the spread – wearing masks, standing at least 6 feet away from others, avoiding congestion, ventilating indoor spaces and washing hands often – will also prevent this from spreading.”
Both strains of the virus found in the UK and South Africa have similar mutations, but experts say they developed separately. Although it’s no surprise that the virus is moving, researchers are quickly trying to determine what the changes might mean for newly developed life-saving vaccines and treatments for the disease.
Strain B.1.351 appears to be more problematic than the emerging variant found in the UK, White House Health Adviser Dr Anthony Fauci said on Wednesday. Fauci said during a press briefing that vaccine-induced antibodies may be less effective in fighting this strain, although “it is still in the protective pillow.”
The first findings published in the bioRxiv prepress server, which have not yet been evaluated by colleagues, indicate that variant B.1.351 may steal the antibodies provided by some coronavirus treatments and may reduce the effectiveness of the current line of available vaccines. On Monday, Moderna said its vaccine could be less effective against strain B.1.351 and that it is developing a so-called booster shot to protect against this variant “out of an abundance of precaution”.
Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in an interview with CNN on Wednesday that the new mRNA technology used to develop Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines – the only two to have received emergency authorization in the United States – could be changed. easily to target variants.
These booster photos should not go through the rigorous phase of three clinical trials that required thousands of participants, he added.
“You don’t have to do a 30,000-person trial or a 40,000-person trial,” Fauci said. “You work with the FDA and you could link information from one process to another. The bottom line is that we’re already on it. “
– CNBC’s Will Feuer contributed to this report.