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Medical staff member Christina Mathers cares for a patient, who is unconscious, while holding a patient’s hand in the COVID-19 intensive care unit (ICU) at United Memorial Medical Center on December 21, 2020 in Houston, Texas .
Go Nakamura | fake images
The new strain of coronavirus that was first detected in the UK may already be circulating in the United States without warning, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Tuesday.
While the variant has yet to be 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 have only been sequenced from about 51,000 of the 17 million cases in the United States,” so the new strain may have gone undetected.
“Ongoing travel between the UK and the US, as well as the high prevalence of this variant among current UK infections, increase the likelihood of importation,” the CDC said in a statement. “Given the small fraction of US infections that have been sequenced, the variant could already be in the United States without being detected.”
The new variant is currently known as “SARS-CoV-2 VUI 202012/01,” the CDC said. It became prevalent in south-east England in November and reportedly accounts for 60% of recent infections in London, the agency said. The CDC said they do not know why the new strain of the virus emerged, but it could have been “just by chance.”
“Alternatively, it may be emerging because it is better suited to spread in humans,” the CDC said. “This rapid change from being a rare strain to becoming a common strain has worried UK scientists, who are urgently evaluating the characteristics of the variant strain and the disease it causes.”
The new coronavirus “mutates regularly,” the CDC noted, but the vast majority of mutations are insignificant. The significance of the new variant first found in the UK has yet to be determined, but the CDC noted that, based on early UK data, the new strain could “potentially be transmissible more quickly than other circulating strains.”
This is a news flash. Check back here for updates.
