Two patients from South Carolina are the first in the United States to be diagnosed with a mutated strain of the coronavirus, raising concerns that this more transmissible variant could become dominant here and across the country.
There are now a few variants of COVID-19 spreading from different parts of the world. The SC Department of Health and Environmental Control announced Thursday that the two patients in South Carolina were diagnosed with the B.1.351 variant, a strain first identified in South Africa about six weeks ago.
President Joe Biden added the African country to a travel ban earlier this week to limit the spread of the virus, but the restrictions come weeks after South Carolina patients tested positive in early January. It was only this week that it was determined that they tested positive for this specific new variant.
According to DHEC, one patient is from Lowcountry and the other from the Pee Dee, and both are now doing “well,” said a health department official. The agency released some other personal details, citing the patient’s privacy, but did say the two cases were unrelated and neither person had known travel history.
Although the B.1.351 variant is believed to spread more easily than SARS-CoV-2, it is not known to cause more serious cases of COVID-19. The vaccines currently being administered are also believed to be protective against the new strains, although Moderna, one of the two manufacturers that make coronavirus vaccines, is now looking into making a booster shot that would make the inoculation more effective against the South African tribe. .
But with South Carolina taking second place in the country in new cases reported per capita, the last thing the state needs when facing the worst of the virus, according to a report by the White House task force, but still wave of diseases that has killed approximately. 6,700 people here. It is spreading so quickly that DHEC says it has scaled back its contacts tracking targets.
“We know that viruses mutate to live and live to mutate,” said Dr. Brannon Traxler, interim health director for DHEC. She added that the same social distancing measures that have been proven to work in the past year will also stop the spread of the mutated species.
Neither DHEC nor the governor’s office on Thursday proposed further lockdowns or restrictions to prevent further spread of the disease.
“This is important information for the South Carolina people, but it is no cause for alarm,” Governor Henry McMaster wrote to constituents on Twitter about the new species.
The fact that the two cases have no known travel connection suggests the mutated virus is already spreading in South Carolina. It is impossible to say how widespread it has already become. Although the state health department processes more than 100,000 tests for COVID-19 each week, DHEC only sequences the genetic material from two dozen samples every week to look for variants, The Post and Courier recently reported.
Traxler said DHEC is steadily increasing the number of samples it uses to find out how widespread the species has become. Private labs also test for variants.
Each of the two South Carolina patients who tested positive for variant B.1.351 was diagnosed with COVID-19 in early January. DHEC acknowledged that it took several weeks to establish that these positive COVID-19 cases were, in fact, a different variant than has ever been discovered in the US. The agency explained that it takes time to sequence the samples to determine if it is an example of one of the variants, and Traxler said those efforts are not as urgent as the diagnostic tests.
“The urgency is still to diagnose someone whether they have COVID-19 or not,” she said.
Major diagnostics company LabCorp discovered one of two cases in its tests, and DHEC was notified late on Wednesday. The agency found the other positive case, including on Wednesday, through routine sampling on Monday.
According to the World Health Organization, variants of the virus that causes COVID-19 surfaced internationally late last year.
There are three that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are concerned about, and with news from South Carolina Thursday, they’ve all been found somewhere in the United States.
A strain that first showed up in the UK on December 14 has become dominant in that country and has led to renewed lockdowns. At a White House briefing Wednesday, the CDC’s new director said 308 cases of the British variant have been confirmed in 26 states.
South Carolina wasn’t one of them.
A first case of the Brazilian variant was announced in the United States on Tuesday. A person who traveled from the Latin American country to Minnesota tested positive for that strain.
The CDC also says that the lab tests that have become the standard for health departments and hospitals should be able to detect the variant and return a positive result.
Those results do not indicate whether the individual has the variant strain or not, only that they are positive or negative for COVID-19. Further lab tests would be needed to find out, said Dr. Krutika Kuppalli, a member of the Medical University of South Carolina’s division of infectious diseases.
Knowing that the strain is present is important information for researchers studying the spread of the disease.
While it may not matter to the person which strain of the coronavirus they contract, Kuppalli said it’s more important than ever to follow social distance guidelines, practice good hand hygiene, and wear a mask. These measures work anyway and, if applied aggressively, can prevent the variant from becoming dominant here.
“All you have to do is look at what is happening in England and worry that it is going to happen in other parts of the world too,” she said.
According to research from Carnegie Mellon University, about one in 13 people in South Carolina say they don’t wear a mask in public. The results, of thousands of surveys of Facebook users in every state, have steadily improved over time, but still place South Carolina slightly below the national average.
To achieve Mary Katherine Wildeman at 843-607-4312. Follow her on Twitter @mkwildeman.