New UK variant looks 70% more transmissible (Representational)
Washington:
The United States is monitoring the emerging new strain of COVID-19 in the United Kingdom, several US officials said Sunday, adding that it was unclear whether the mutated variant had made its way to the United States.
“We don’t know yet. We are, of course … looking at this very carefully,” Dr. Moncef Slaoui, director of the US COVID-19 vaccination program, told CNN’s “State of the Union” program.
Slaoui, chief scientific adviser to the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed, added that it was “highly unlikely” that the UK mutation was resistant to current vaccines, saying: “We cannot exclude it, but it is not there. now”.
Other health officials from the outgoing Trump administration and the incoming Biden administration also said they were seeing tension spreading rapidly in Britain. The new UK variant appears 70% more transmissible, forcing new lockdown measures on Britain and travel restrictions on its European neighbors.
US President Donald Trump’s Surgeon General Jerome Adams said that while mutant viruses were not unusual, any new strain of COVID-19 means Americans need to be more vigilant about washing their hands, wearing masks, maintaining the distance and avoid the crowds.
“At this time, we have no indication that it is going to impair our ability to continue vaccinating people or that it is more dangerous or deadly than the currently existing strains that we know of,” Adams told CBS News. “Face the Nation” program.
When asked about the potential impact on travel between the US and the UK, US Assistant Secretary for Health Admiral Brett Giroir told ABC News’s “This Week”: “I don’t think there should be No reason to be alarmed at this point. We keep looking. “
“We don’t know if it’s more dangerous,” added Giroir, a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force. “Right now, it seems like the vaccine should cover everything we see.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is posted from a syndicated feed.)
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