SAN JOSE – A potentially more contagious COVID-19 variant increasingly spreading across California is now ‘relatively common’ in Santa Clara County, where it contributed to the infamous Christmas Day outbreak in a Kaiser emergency room and several other outbreaks .
“The variant has been identified in cases from many of these environments, including those related to the Kaiser outbreak, outbreaks from skilled nursing homes, cases in prisons and shelters, and specimens from community testing sites,” the county said in a statement sent. to this news organization Monday.
“This suggests that the variant is now relatively common in our community,” the statement added.
On Sunday evening, provincial public health official Dr. Sara Cody joined the state and other local health officials to announce that the 452R variant was responsible for several outbreaks in the South Bay, including those that infected at least 74 Kaiser employees and 15 patients in the emergency room of the South San Jose Hospital.
A hospital receptionist died from the Kaiser outbreak, which was largely attributed to an employee who made an unannounced visit to the emergency department to bring some holiday spirit. She was wearing an inflatable Christmas tree costume that may have spread the virus because it used air through current circulation.
Kaiser confirmed the presence of 452R in the outbreak in a statement Monday, adding that those who tested positive “are now past their contagious period and have no symptoms.”
At Sunday’s press conference, Santa Clara County officials formally linked no other outbreaks to the variant, including a series of major outbreaks in the county jail and one that hit the San Jose State University football team before playing a bowl game and lost at the end of a historically successful season.
Monday’s statement linked the tension to the other outbreaks, but not to the football team.
In addition to Santa Clara County, the 452R variant has been detected in Humboldt, Lake, Los Angeles, Mono, Monterey, Orange, Riverside, San Francisco, San Bernardino, San Diego, and San Luis Obispo counties.
Cody said more and more of the 452R strain is being detected in the South Bay because Santa Clara County is performing more genomic sequencing than most other California counties.
“We searched more and found more,” she said.
The news of the spreading variant is because virus trends are showing some positive signs, with the increase in COVID-19 cases and deaths reported in California on Sunday slowing down from a week ago. At about 39,700 a day, the average daily number of cases in California has dropped by about 11% in the past week. The state still has an average of about 513 fatalities per day – more than one every three minutes – but that’s only 7% more than a week ago, compared to a 43.5% increase the week before.
Scientists at the University of Washington who use one of the most widely used and respected computer models to track and project outbreaks also say new infections seem to have peaked in the US and major states, including California, in the past week.
But the positive assessment is based on the public adhering to social detachment, avoiding gatherings, and continuing to wear masks, as well as the absence of a vaccine-resistant virus strain and greatly improved vaccine distribution.
Meanwhile, the already rocky inoculation attempt hit another problem after a group of people suffered severe allergic reactions to a batch of Moderna vaccines in Southern California, prompting Dr. Erica Pan, the state’s top epidemiologist, to call clinics recommended. hundreds of thousands of doses on hold.
More than 330,000 doses of that batch were distributed across the state, and Santa Clara County belonged to several jurisdictions to announce that they were waiting. The county said in a press release that it has no indication that any of the 21,800 doses of the batch under investigation that reached health workers in South Bay were administered.
Cody said the extent to which the variant has been included in the Kaiser outbreak is still being investigated with the help of the Department of Health and the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“That was a very unusual outbreak with a lot of disease, and it seemed to be spreading quite quickly,” she said. “We are trying to understand if the features of that outbreak are due to this variant … or if it has to do with other factors present in this hospital.”
Both Kaiser and public health officials stress that the emergence of the mutant strain does not justify changing existing safety protocols and practices to avoid contracting COVID-19.
“We don’t have any signals at this time that this variant is associated with anything else, such as increased disease severity, although of course we are certainly looking for signs to see if that is revealed,” Cody said.
The newest variety differs from the B.1.1.7 variety, which is a more contagious strain first discovered in the UK. Dr. Charles Chiu, a virologist and professor of laboratory medicine at UC San Francisco, noted that the “very high attack rate” of the variant in some of the outbreaks studied led to “80 and 90 percent” infection scenarios.
Chiu said in an interview Sunday night that the first case of the variant in California was discovered in Alameda County in May. But from mid-November to the last two weeks of December, the number of COVID-19 cases associated with the strain rose from 3.8% to 25%.
“Worryingly, it may be more contagious,” Chiu said at a later briefing, emphasizing that more research is needed to determine how quickly it can be transmitted.
Staff writers Evan Webeck, Lisa M. Krieger, John Woolfolk, Elliott Almond and Julia Prodis Sulek contributed to this report.