The B117 has now been seen in 37 countries, including the United States in Florida, California and Colorado so far. In response, many countries have imposed travel restrictions on aircraft from the UK.
The most serious issue posed by South Africa’s 501Y.V2 is a question that has yet to be definitively resolved. 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 protein (ear of the virus),” Bell said.
For its part, the World Health Organization (WHO) says for now that 501Y.V2 does not appear to be associated with worse symptoms or outcomes, although the WHO continues to investigate the variant. According to the WHO, 501Y.V2 has been reported in four other countries.
UK experts like Bell and policy managers like Health Secretary Matt Hancock are not lacking in words – they say South Africa’s 501Y.V2 variant is much more problematic than the UK’s B117.
“I am incredibly concerned about the South African variant, which is why we took the steps we took to restrict all flights from South Africa,” Hancock told the BBC’s Today program. “This is a very, very important problem … and it’s even more of a problem than the new UK variant.”
These variants of COVID-19 come at a time when stressed health systems are doing their best to manage traditional SARS-CoV-2. Yesterday in the United States, 125,544 people were hospitalized due to the disease, according to the COVID Tracking Project. This is a new one-day album. The number of COVID-related hospitalizations has been more than 100,000 a day for a month.
Meanwhile, Johns Hopkins University reports that 210,479 new cases of COVID-19 occurred yesterday. In addition, 1,394 people died yesterday from the disease.
In the United States, there have been approximately 20.7 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 so far in the pandemic. About 352,000 people have died from the disease in the US.
In the world, there have been 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 on COVID-19 vaccines, but their implementation 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 only been about 4.2 million vaccines.
The CDC says more than 13.7 million doses of vaccine have been distributed across the country. That is, approximately 7 million of the number of doses of COVID vaccine that Operation Warp Speed wanted to reach at this point.
So what is holding things back? Well, the New York News this morning he points to three obstacles. As noted, the current increase in COVID is adding more burden to an already overloaded healthcare system. In addition, many states that have the vaccines plan to take them first to long-term care centers, so distribution is also maintained, depending on the weather. But, as Scott Gottlieb, former director of the Food and Drug Administration, said in a post he wrote in the Wall Street Journal over the weekend: “A vaccine that sits on a shelf for weeks, waiting for its perfect recipient, doesn’t help eliminate the pandemic.”
Finally, the file New York News according to reports, the holidays meant fewer staff from hospitals and other health institutions to receive and distribute vaccines.