“I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s already here,” said Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, a professor of infectious diseases at the UCSF School of Medicine, referring to the new variant of coronavirus.
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He says that unlike the UK, the United States has not done too many genomic tests on COVID-19 positive samples to track emerging variants.
“Mainly because we have so many numbers,” Chin-Hong said.
The CDC says that out of 17 million positive cases, only 51,000 have been sequenced since the pandemic began. For comparison, the CDC says the UK sequenced at least 125,000 samples.
“Given a small portion of US infections that have been sequenced, the variant could already be in the United States undetected,” says a post on the CDC website.
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Known as the VOC variant 202012/01, it has become a prominent strain in England.
Given its rapid spread, Chin-Hong says there is speculation that it could be more contagious than the dominant strain in the US, however this has not yet been determined on a biological basis.
“We haven’t really confirmed that it’s more transmissible through laboratory experiments,” Chin-Hong said.
He says the data show that the variant did not turn out to be more deadly. He also does not believe that he will evade the protections offered by the vaccines already developed.
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“In fact, it takes years for a virus like COVID to move significantly so that a vaccine doesn’t work,” he said.
The CDC has imposed a travel restriction on anyone coming to the United States who has been in the UK for the past 14 days. A negative COVID-19 test performed within 72 hours must be presented to board an entry flight. The policy starts on December 28.
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