The head of the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the coronavirus’ U.K. variant is now the dominant form of COVID-19 in the U.S.
Dr. Rochelle Walensky reportedly made the observation during a White House coronavirus team meeting.
Walensky said the strain, formally known as B.1.1.7, is “now the most common lineage circulating in United States.”
The strain has been shown to be more transmissible and infectious among younger Americans, which Walensky says contributed to rising case counts in recent weeks.
Walensky says new outbreaks have been tied to youth sports and day care centers. She particularly encouraged states with rising caseloads to curtail or suspend youth sports activities to slow the spread of the virus.
The U.S. leads the world with 30.8 million confirmed cases and more than 556,000 confirmed deaths.
A possibly worrisome variant of the coronavirus first identified in India — so new that it has no official name — has been found in California by scientists at Stanford University, The Associated Press reported Tuesday.
Nicknamed the “double mutant” variant by the BBC and others, the variant is sparking concern among some scientists because it contains not just one, but two worrisome mutations in its genetic composition that have been identified among other variants of concern being tracked by the CDC.
“We don’t know how those two mutations behave when they’re paired together,” Dr. Benjamin Pinsky, director of the Clinical Virology Laboratory at Stanford, said in an interview Monday.
The existence of the newly discovered variant was first disclosed by India’s government on March 24, Pinsky said, after a surge of coronavirus cases was detected in the nation’s second-most populous state, Maharashtra, whose largest city is Mumbai. The new variant is responsible for roughly 15% to 20% of new coronavirus cases there.
A day later, on March 25, the Stanford lab identified the same variant in a coronavirus sample taken from a patient in the San Francisco Bay Area.
“On the 25th, we actually got our sequence back and found that, ‘Wow, this is actually the same variant that they’re talking about,’” Pinsky said. “So this rapid spread across the globe is pretty impressive and also a bit concerning.”
None of the other variants being monitored by federal officials have the same combination of these two mutations, known as L452R and E484Q, the latter of which is closely related to a more well-known mutation known as E484K.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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