Dr. Peter Hotez, co-director of the Texas Children’s Hospital Vaccine Development Center, says the United States is “on a difficult journey” as new variants of Covid spread across the country.
“Because they’re more transmissible, it means more Americans will become infected, so while we’ve had a slight decrease in the number of new cases … the expectation will now rise again because of these new ones. variants, “Hotez said in a Thursday evening interview on” The News with Shepard Smith. ” “More people will become infected, restart overwhelming hospital systems, and possibly the mortality rate will begin to rise, both from a combination of newer cases in general and from the possibility of having slightly higher mortality rates than the variant by the nature of the variant. “
South Carolina health officials confirmed two cases of Covid’s dangerous and highly transmissible South African variety. Officials said the cases do not appear to be connected and are not related to any recent travel. Dr. Zeke Emanuel, a member of President Joe Biden’s Covid Advisory Board, said that’s why the South African strain is so troubling.
“This is worrying because these two individuals have no evidence of travel and therefore means that the variant from South Africa, which is more worrying than even the British variant, is close and to the community,” he said. Emanuel.
Hotez told host Shep Smith that new strains are even more problematic because “we haven’t been looking for it.”
“We’ve had insufficient performance in genomic sequencing, which is how we collect these variants from the UK, South Africa and Brazil, so we know they’re in South Carolina, but they could be elsewhere,” he said. the dean of the National. Baylor College of Medicine School of Tropical Medicine.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned that the UK variant, also known as B117, could be dominant in the United States in the spring. Hotez said the key to protecting the population was to vaccinate people at a faster rate.
“The bottom line is that we need to find a way to vaccinate the American people faster than current projections,” Hotez said. “One, to reduce hospitalization and death, but also to advance these variants. If we can vaccinate three-quarters of the American population, we could interrupt transmission and prevent some of these new variants from becoming dominant “.