Medical staff member Christina Mathers is assisting a patient who is unconscious while holding the patient’s hand in the COVID-19 Intensive Care Unit (ICU) at United Memorial Medical Center on December 21, 2020 in Houston, Texas.
Go to Nakamura | Getty Images
The new coronavirus strain that was first detected in the United Kingdom could already be circulating in the United States without prior notice, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Tuesday.
Although the variant has not yet been found in the US, the CDC noted that scientists have not sequenced the genetic coding for many Covid-19 infections here. The CDC said that “viruses were sequenced in only about 51,000 of the 17 million cases in the United States,” so the new strain may not have been noticed.
“Continued travel between the United Kingdom and the United States, as well as the high prevalence of this variant among current infections in the UK, increase the likelihood of imports,” the CDC said in a statement. “Given a small portion of U.S. infections that have been sequenced, the variant may already be in the United States undetected.”
The new variant is currently called “SARS-CoV-2 VUI 202012/01,” the CDC said. It became widespread in the south-east of England in November and appears to account for 60% of recent infections in London, the agency said. The CDC said it did not know why the new strain of the virus appeared, but it could have been “just a coincidence.”
“Alternatively, it may arise because it is more appropriate to spread to people,” the CDC said. This rapid shift from being a rare strain to becoming a common strain has concerned UK scientists, who are urgently evaluating the characteristics of the variant strain and the disease it causes.
The new coronavirus “moves regularly,” the CDC noted, but the vast majority of mutations are insignificant. The significance of the new variant first found in the UK has not yet been established, but the CDC noted that, based on early UK data, the new strain could be “transmissible faster than other circulating strains”.
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