A resident of the Triboro Center nursing home in the Bronx receives a dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine.
Photographer: Eric Lee / Bloomberg
Photographer: Eric Lee / Bloomberg
An easier-to-spread variant of Covid-19 first detected in the US last week could amplify the wave of the virus, if it hasn’t already, adding to the urgency for a faster, more effective vaccination.
Only three states – Colorado, California, and Florida – have it identified cases of the mutated species that has been raging in the UK for months. But US health officials say they don’t yet know how far the variant has traveled in the US, or what it might mean for the future.
“I suspect it is more widespread than we know,” said Michelle Barron, senior medical director of infection prevention and control at UCHealth, a health care system with a dozen hospitals and hundreds of clinics in Colorado. “It’s a function of ‘if you search for it, you will find it.’ ”
The discovery of the mutated strain in the US is because the push to vaccinate most Americans was hampered by ineffective coordination and a lack of federal support for states and health care systems. While, according to Bloomberg, more than 4.28 million Americans were vaccinated on Saturday night vaccine tracker, that’s far less than the 20 million doses that U.S. health officials predicted by the end of 2020.
Meanwhile, the number of infections is on the rise, with nearly 231,000 new cases reported in the US on Thursday before the holiday weekend, when reporting may be sporadic. Four states – including New York and California – have exceeded 1 million infections in total, and more than 350,000 Americans have died.
“It’s a race and this variation has made the whole challenge even more formidable,” said Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute in La Jolla, California. “Whatever we saw in 2020 in terms of a challenging virus, it will be taken to a new level.”
Disperse vaccines has been a challenge to a US health system under pressure from a concomitant increase in infections. State and local governments grapple with complex logistics to keep the photos cold, decide who should get early access, and convince vaccine skeptics.
To increase the amount of vaccine available, the US government is considering reducing the dose by half Moderna Inc. shot given to those 18 to 55, said Moncef Slaoui, Operation Warp Speed’s Chief Scientific Officer, on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” He said there is some evidence that the half dose provides the same level of protection for that age group.
Slaoui’s comments came in response to a question about the UK’s decision to give as many people their first dose of a vaccine as possible Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE, while you may be delaying a second dose. He said such a shift would be a mistake for the US as it was not supported by pilot data.
CDC investigations
Meanwhile, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are currently trying to model what effect the variant could have on accelerating the spread, said Kristen Nordlund, a spokeswoman for the agency. But at the moment, “we don’t have any results,” Nordlund said in an email.
Before November, only a select number of US cases had been sequenced, a laboratory procedure that can determine the genetic makeup of the pathogen as it travels through the population. However, the CDC has since launched a national program to detect new strains, said Greg Armstrong, director of the CDC’s advanced molecular detection program.
The CDC is now scaling until According to Armstrong, individually sequence 750 samples each week, and the agency works with laboratories across the country to map the genetic material of about 1,750 virus samples weekly.
The agency is also investigating whether the mutations could make existing treatments less effective, according to Henry Walke, the CDC’s Covid-19 incident manager. Still, there’s no reason measures such as wearing a mask and social distancing would be any less effective in preventing transmission of the new tribe, he said during a phone call with reporters last week.
Viruses mutate
Viruses have the ability to change through mutations that arise naturally as they multiply and circulate in their hosts. Some, like influenza, evolve quickly with thousands of mutations and different lineages, while others are more stable.
The new variant, known scientifically as B.1.1.7, contains a large number of mutations, which is unusual, said Andy Pekosz, director of the Center for Emerging Viruses and Infectious Diseases on Johns Hopkins University. Of particular concern is the change in the spike protein, which binds to human cells, allowing the virus to enter.
Scientists suspect these mutations make it easier for the spike protein to attach. The new strain is believed to be 57% to 70% more transmissible than other strains of the virus.
Prevalence in the UK
In the UK, the new variant was responsible for 62% of Covid-19 infections in London in the week ending December 9, up from 28% in early November, according to Paul Hunter, a professor of medicine at the UK. Norwich School of Medicine at the University of East Anglia. Cases have also been identified in more than a dozen other countries, including Australia, Canada, Germany, Italy, Japan, Lebanon, the Netherlands, Singapore, and South Korea.
In Colorado, state scientists are attempting to perform full genetic sequencing on samples showing signs of the British variant, according to scientific director Emily Travanty. Samples are marked when only two of the three genes targeted by the state’s gold standard PCR tests are found, indicating that a mutation has occurred in the third – the critical spike protein.
The missing gene is present, according to Travanty, but undetectable by the test because of the mutation, making it a signature of the variant, she said. When labs find that red flag, it indicates that more research is needed.
Much unknown
“There is a lot we don’t know about this variant,” Colorado Governor Jared Polis said last week after the first US case was discovered in his state. “But if it’s shipped faster, more people will get it and more people will be hospitalized.”
Still, there are some positive findings regarding the variant. It’s apparently no more deadly, but if more people were infected, more people would die. And it is not believed to be able to replace the two vaccines already distributed in the US Pfizer Inc.-BioNTech SE shot, and the Moderna Inc. shot.
“There is good news here,” said Topol. “It does not affect the effectiveness of the vaccine. That is why there is this race. If we get ahead of this and get everyone vaccinated, if we do it quickly, we will have this virus under control. “
Speed of transmission
Meanwhile, in the UK, the extra transmission speed, believed to be related to the new strain, is noticeable. The number of new cases has risen dramatically in recent weeks, even as the country instituted stronger and stronger lockdowns, said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.
In the US, wearing a mask and stepping back from social media is often more of a political issue than a public health issue, with at least one adviser to President Donald Trump suggesting herd immunity occurs, which occurs when enough people are immune for a disease to make her succeed. spread unlikely, can be achieved by simply allowing the disease to run wild.
While that theory could be more easily tested by giving free rein to the new variant, the cost would be significantly more cases and deaths among Americans. The best idea is to give the country immunity based on higher vaccination coverage, not transmission, Osterholm said.
“To get there with infection or vaccination, with protection or disease – we will get there,” Ossterholm said. “Our job is to minimize disease-related protection.”
Deviate in time
The composition of the virus will diverge over time, as is the case with all viruses, scientists suggest, and the changes could eventually warrant a new vaccine. But that could take years, they said.
Still, there is a risk that the virus could build on the new variant, creating more devastating mutations that could cause more serious disease or render vaccines and therapies ineffective.
“Each time it piles up new changes, it opens up the landscape in which the virus can evolve,” said Pekosz of Johns Hopkins. “This virus is mutating, but is it evolving? We do not know yet. That’s why we need to monitor the changes. “
Take the flu, for example. When it interacts with people who have immune protection, it will mutate to bypass that immunity, Pekosz said. Measles, on the other hand, tends to die.
“The coronavirus hasn’t seen enough people who are immune to let us predict what it’s going to do,” he said.
– With the assistance of Angelica LaVito