GoldenRod
10 years on LIF!
Member since 11/06 26792 total posts
Name:
Shawn
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Covid-19 B.1.1.7 variant
https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/15/health/covid-variant-cdc-spread-us/index.html
(CNN)New, more contagious variants of the coronavirus will likely accelerate the spread of the virus and that means the US must double down on efforts to protect people, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Friday.
A variant first identified in Britain known as B.1.1.7 is being found in the US as well, and modeling indicates it could worsen the already terrible spread of the virus across the country, the CDC researchers said.
That means people need to try harder to wear masks, avoid gatherings and stay socially distant from one another.
"It means that it is going to be harder and harder to control it. Any of those measures we are going to have to do to a higher degree, including vaccination," Dr. Gregory Armstrong, who directs the Office of Advanced Molecular Detection at CDC's respiratory diseases division, told CNN.
"Multiple lines of evidence indicate that B.1.1.7 is more efficiently transmitted than are other SARS-CoV-2 variants," Armstrong and colleagues wrote in the agency's weekly report, the MMWR.
"Variant B.1.1.7 has the potential to increase the U.S. pandemic trajectory in the coming months."
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The B.1.1.7 variant appears to more readily infect human cells, which would help it infect more people.
It has been detected in about a dozen US states, but the CDC also knows that surveillance is poor and it is likely far more common than that. It is also possible that the pattern of mutations that makes the virus more transmissible is arising independently as it circulates in people, because the more people are infected, the more chances the virus has to mutate.
The CDC team ran an experimental model to see what might happen in the near future. It's not known how much more transmissible B.1.1.7 is, and it's also not known how much immunity there already is in the US population because of previous infections, so the team made some assumptions. In one scenario, the new variant is 50% more infectious than currently dominant variants circulating.
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The new variant does not seem to result in higher rates of hospitalization or higher rates of death, he noted.
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So, it's not more dangerous, but it means people are more likely to get the disease.
There's obviously even less research and knowledge about this variant than the original, so a lot of information is not known yet.
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