A variant first identified in the UK known as B.1.1.7 is also found in the US, and the modeling indicates that it could aggravate the already terrible spread of the virus across the country, CDC researchers said.
This means that people need to work harder to wear masks, avoid gatherings and stay socially distant from each other.
“It means it’s going to be harder and harder to control it. Any of these measures have to be done to a higher degree, including vaccination,” said Dr. Gregory Armstrong, who heads the Division of Advanced Molecular Detection at the Division. CDC for respiratory disease, he told CNN.
“Several lines of evidence indicate that B.1.1.7 is transmitted more efficiently than other SARS-CoV-2 variants,” Armstrong and colleagues wrote in the agency’s weekly report, MMWR.
“Variant B.1.1.7 has the potential to increase the trajectory of the US pandemic in the coming months.”
Vaccination efforts for people – already slower than the federal government hoped and promised – must be stepped up, the CDC said.
“Greater vaccination coverage may be needed to protect the public,” the researchers wrote.
The virus has already infected more people in the United States and killed more than in any other country. By Friday afternoon, according to Johns Hopkins University, the virus had been diagnosed in 23 million people in the United States and killed more than 390,000.
Variant B.1.1.7 seems to infect human cells more easily, which would help it to infect more people.
It has been detected in about a dozen US states, but the CDC also knows that surveillance is weak and is probably much more common than that. It is also possible that the pattern of mutations that make the virus more transmissible appears independently as it circulates in humans, because the more infected people are, the more likely the virus is to move.
The CDC team developed an experimental model to see what could happen in the near future. It is not known how much is more transmissible B.1.1.7 and also it is not known how much immunity already exists in the US population due to previous infections, so the team made some assumptions. In one scenario, the new variant is 50% more infectious than the current dominant variants circulating.
“In this model, the prevalence of B.1.1.7 is initially low, however, because it is more transmissible than the current variants, it shows a rapid growth in early 2021, becoming the predominant variant in March,” wrote the CDC team.
“If this behaves as it has done so far in the UK, Denmark and Ireland, yes, it will become an increasing proportion in all cases, no matter what we do,” Armstrong said.
“That doesn’t mean cases will necessarily increase,” Armstrong added. “That doesn’t mean we can’t do anything.”
The new variant does not appear to result in higher hospitalization rates or higher death rates, he noted.
“While there is a high probability that this will become an increasing proportion of all cases, if we can get people to adhere to the recommended measures, the number of cases should not increase,” Armstrong said.
In addition, the CDC needs to do more to pay attention to new variants and their emergence.
“The CDC has also contracted with several large commercial clinical laboratories to rapidly sequence tens of thousands of SARS-CoV-2 positive specimens each month and funded seven academic institutions to conduct genomic surveillance in partnership with health agencies. thus substantially adding to the timely availability of genomic surveillance data from across the United States, “the team wrote.
The CDC is also looking at a variant first identified in South Africa and now called B.1.351, plus one observed among four travelers from Brazil when they landed in Japan, called B.1.1.28
“These variants carry a constellation of genetic mutations,” the CDC team wrote.
Concerns are that the virus could change in ways that would help it evade vaccination-induced immunity or immunity introduced with antibody-based treatments. The new coronavirus vaccines are designed to be quick and easy to change to suit the new circulating strains, but a major change would mean that people should be re-vaccinated.
It is also possible that some of the changes make the virus more difficult to detect in standard tests.
And the CDC is also worried that if the virus changes exactly the right way, it could reinfect people who have already recovered from the coronavirus. The flu is already doing this.