Medical staff member Christina Mathers treats a patient, who is unconscious, while holding the patient’s hand in the COVID-19 intensive care unit (ICU) at the United Memorial Medical Center on December 21, 2020 in Houston, Texas.
Go Nakamura | Getty Images
The new strain of coronavirus first discovered in the United Kingdom could already circulate in the United States without notice, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Tuesday.
Although the variant has not yet been 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 US,” so the new strain could have been noticed.
“Continued travel between the UK and the US, as well as the high prevalence of this variant among current UK infections, increases the likelihood of imports,” the CDC said in a statement. “Given the small proportion of sequenced US infections, the variant could already be in the United States without being detected.”
The new variant is currently referred to as “SARS-CoV-2 VUI 202012/01,” said the CDC. It occurred throughout South East England in November and is said to be responsible for 60% of recent infections in London, the agency said. The CDC said it does not know why the new strain of the virus emerged, but it could have been “only by chance.”
“Alternatively, it may be emerging because it is better suited to spread in humans,” said the CDC. “This rapid change from a rare species to a common species has concerned scientists in the UK who are urgently evaluating the characteristics of the variant strain and the disease it causes.”
The new coronavirus “mutates regularly,” 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 CDC noted that based on early data from the UK, the new strain “could potentially be more rapidly transmissible than other circulating strains.”
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