“I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s already here,” said Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, a professor of infectious diseases at the UCSF School of Medicine, referring to the new variant of coronavirus.
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He says that, unlike the UK, the United States has not done too much genomic testing on COVID-19 positive samples to track emerging variants.
“Mainly because we have a lot of numbers,” Chin-Hong said.
The CDC says of the 17 million positive cases, only 51,000 have been sequenced since the pandemic began. By comparison, the CDC says the UK has sequenced at least 125,000 samples.
“Given the small fraction of U.S. infections that have been sequenced, the variant could already be in the United States undetected,” says a post on the CDC website.
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Known as the VOC variant 202012/01, it has become a prominent variety in England.
Given its rapid spread, Chin-Hong says it is speculated that it may be more contagious than the dominant strain in the United States, but this has not yet been determined from a biological basis.
“We haven’t really confirmed that it’s more transmissible through lab experiments,” Chin-Hong said.
He says the data show that the variant has not been shown to be more deadly. Nor does he believe it will evade protections given by vaccines that have already been developed.
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“In fact, it takes years for some viruses like COVID to mutate appreciably for a vaccine not to work,” he said.
The CDC has set a travel restriction for anyone coming to the United States who has been in the United Kingdom for the past 14 days. A negative COVID-19 test performed within 72 hours must be submitted to board an incoming flight. Politics begins on December 28th.
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