B117 has now been spotted in a total of 37 countries, including the United States in Florida, California and Colorado. In response, many countries have issued travel restrictions on planes coming from the UK.
How much more serious a threat South Africa’s 501Y.V2 represents is a question that has not yet been definitively answered. John Bell, a professor of medicine at Oxford University, told Times Radio (a subsidiary of the London Times), that both B117 and 501Y.V2 have different mutations; they are not a single mutation. “And the mutations associated with the South African form are really quite substantial changes in the structure of the (virus’ spike) protein,” said Bell.
The World Health Organization (WHO), for its part, says that 501Y.V2 does not appear to be associated with worse symptoms or outcomes, although the WHO continues to investigate the variant. According to WHO, 501Y.V2 has been reported in four other countries.
British experts like Bell, and policy administrators like Health Secretary Matt Hancock don’t talk about it: they say the South African 501Y.V2 variant is much more problematic than the British B117.
“I am incredibly concerned about the South African variant, which is why we have taken the action we have taken to restrict all flights from South Africa,” Hancock told the BBC’s Today program. “This is a very, very big problem … and it’s even a bigger problem than the new variant in the UK.”
These COVID-19 variants are getting to a point where stressed health systems are working hard to manage traditional SARS-CoV-2. According to the COVID Tracking Project, 125,544 people were hospitalized yesterday in the United States for the disease. That is a new one-day record. The number of COVID-related hospital admissions is more than 100,000 per day for a month.
Meanwhile, Johns Hopkins University reports that there were 210,479 new cases of COVID-19 yesterday. In addition, 1,394 people died from the disease yesterday.
In the US, there are about 20.7 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 during the pandemic so far. About 352,000 people have died of the disease in the US.
In the world, there are more than 85 million confirmed cases of COVID-19; while more than 1.8 million people have died from the disease.
Much hope has been placed in the COVID-19 vaccines, but their rollout has not gone as planned. Health officials wanted to vaccinate at least 20 million people at this point. But according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), there have been only about 4.2 million vaccinations.
The CDC says more than 13.7 million vaccine doses have been distributed nationwide. That’s about 7 million less than the number of COVID vaccine doses that Operation Warp Speed intended to deliver at this point.
So, what’s slowing things down? Well, the New York Times this morning highlights three obstacles. As noted, the current surge in COVID is putting an additional burden on an already overburdened healthcare system. Also, many states that have the vaccines plan to get them to long-term care facilities first, so that’s also holding back distribution, according to the times. But as Scott Gottlieb, MD, the former head of the Food and Drug Administration put it in an opinion piece he wrote in the Wall Street Journal over the weekend: “A vaccine left on a shelf for weeks, waiting for the perfect recipient, is not going to stop the pandemic.”
finally, the New York Times reports, the holiday meant fewer staff in hospitals and other health care facilities to receive and distribute the vaccines.