To date, health experts have identified at least three variants of coronavirus, identified by the countries they appear to come from: the United Kingdom, South Africa and Brazil.
Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told Wolf Blitzer on CNN that South African health experts saw that the variant there had such a high reinfection rate that the previous infection did not appear to protect people. .
Even if current vaccines do not provide the same level of protection against the variants, they can protect against serious illness, including hospitalization and death, Fauci said. They could also prevent variants from becoming more dominant.
“Viruses cannot move if they do not reproduce. And if you stop replication by vaccinating widely and not giving the virus an open playing field to continue to respond to the pressures you have put on, you will not get mutations,” Fauci said in -a virtual news briefing with the response team at the Covid-19 White House.
“You need to get vaccinated when it becomes available as quickly and as quickly as possible across the country.”
More transmissible variants widespread in the USA
The variant identified in Great Britain has already made its way to several American states.
On Monday, the Iowa Department of Health said three cases had been identified. Officials contacted the infected to monitor their health and to notify the people they were in contact with.
“State and local public health officials are conducting additional epidemiological investigations to gather more details about the disease, travel history and potential exposures,” IDPH spokeswoman Sarah Ekstrand told CNN.
Georgia officials have identified 19 cases in the Atlanta subway area, the Department of Health said Monday. The cases belong to people aged between 15 and 61 years.
The first known case of the South Carolina variant was identified in an adult from the Lowcountry region who traveled internationally, the agency said on Saturday.
And although Covid-19 cases have been steadily declining in Colorado, the state has identified 13 strains in the UK, Colorado epidemiologist Dr. Rachel Herlihy told reporters during a Zoom press conference.
The state is “working hard” to make the distribution of a vaccine against the virus fair and transparent, said Brigadier General Scott Sherman of the Colorado National Guard.
32 million doses of vaccine given in the United States
Vaccine distribution and administration has been slow, but officials hope to speed up the dose to states and into people’s arms to put their arms around the pandemic and growing variants.
To date, more than 32 million doses of Covid-19 vaccine have been administered in the United States, with 26 million people receiving at least one dose and nearly 6 million completely vaccinated, according to data released Monday by the Centers for Disease Control in the United States. US. and Prevention.
Both Michigan and North Carolina have delivered more than a million doses of the vaccine, officials said.
“Reaching this stage is good news for our families, front-line workers and small business owners, but there is more work to be done,” said Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. “My administration is working closely with the federal government to help us get the supplies we need to achieve our goal and get us back to the normalcy we all want. I ask for patience from Michiganders, because our front-line workers working non-stop to administer vaccines “.
“We have long planned for most of Minnesota to get vaccinated in places where they are used to receiving their health care,” Walz said in a news release. “But not everyone has a doctor or a pharmacy they’re familiar with. That’s why we’ve built a network of trust in different ways that Minnesota people can access the vaccine.”
Studies suggest that people previously infected with Covid-19 may only need one dose of vaccine
Those who have already been infected with coronavirus and hope to avoid reinfection may only need one dose of vaccine instead of the two being given to the majority, according to a study published Monday.
People who were previously infected with the virus tended to have antibody levels that were higher or higher than those who received both doses but were never infected, as well as more widespread side effects after the first dose. , wrote the authors of the study, which was not evaluated by colleagues.
The authors argue that “changing the policy to provide these individuals with a single dose of vaccine would not have a negative impact on their antibody titers, relieve them of unnecessary pain, and release many doses of emergency vaccine.”
Follow-up studies will show whether these early differences in immune responses are maintained over time, they wrote.
The CDC says people should be vaccinated even if they have had Covid-19 because it is not yet clear how long the antibody protection lasts.
Andrea Diaz, Deidre McPhillips, Christina Maxouris, Keith Allen, Gisela Crespo, Laurie Ure, Rebekah Riess, Amanda Sealy and Michael Nedelman of CNN contributed to this report