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The SARS-CoV-2 variant first detected in the UK is rapidly becoming the dominant strain in several countries and is doubling every 10 days in the US, according to new data.
The findings of Nicole L. Washington, Ph.D., associate research director at genomics firm Helix, and colleagues, were posted Sunday on the prepress server. medRxiv. The paper has not been peer-reviewed in a scientific journal.
The researchers also found that the transmission rate in the United States of the variant, labeled as B.1.1.7, is 30% to 40% higher than that of the most common lineages.
Although clinical results were initially thought to be similar to those of other SARS-CoV-2 variants, early reports suggest that infection with variant B.1.1.7 may increase the risk of death by 30%. about.
A co-author of the current study said Kristian Andersen The New York Times “Nothing in this article is surprising, but people should see it.”
Andersen, a virologist at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, added that “we should probably prepare for this to be the predominant lineage in most places in the United States before March.”
The study of variant B.1.1.7 adds support for last month’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) forecast that would dominate in March.
“Our study shows that the US has a similar trajectory to that of other countries where B.1.1.7 quickly became the dominant variant of SARS-CoV-2, requiring immediate and decisive action to minimize morbidity and mortality of COVID-19, ”the researchers write. .
The authors note that variant B.1.1.7 became the dominant SARS-CoV-2 strain in the United Kingdom within a few months of its detection.
“Since then, the variant has been increasingly observed in many European countries, including Portugal and Ireland, which, like the United Kingdom, observed devastating waves of COVID-19 after B.1.1.7 became dominant.” write the authors.
Category 5 storm
As they write, variant B.1.1.7 has probably spread among U.S. states at least since December.
Medscape Medical news reported Jan. 15 that as of Jan. 13, variant B.1.1.7 was seen in 76 cases in 12 U.S. states, according to an early CDC statement Weekly Morbidity and Mortality Report (MMWR).
As of Sunday, there were 690 cases of variant B.1.1.7 in the U.S. in 33 states, according to the CDC.
Washington and colleagues examined more than 500,000 coronavirus testing samples from U.S. cases that were tested at the Helix facility based in San Mateo, California, since July.
In the study, they found inconsistent prevalence of the inter-state variant. In the last week of January, the researchers estimated that the proportion of B.1.1.7 in the U.S. population was 2.1% of all COVID-19 cases, although they found that it accounted for approximately 2% of all COVID-19 cases in California and about 4.5% of cases in Florida. The authors acknowledge that their data are less solid outside of these two states.
Although it appears to be a relatively low frequency, “our estimates show that its growth rate increases and doubles by at least 35% to 45% every week and a half,” the authors write.
“Because U.S. laboratories only sequence a small subset of SARS-CoV-2 samples, the true diversity of SARS-CoV-2 sequences in this country is still unknown,” they point out.
Michael Osterholm, PhD, MPH, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, said last week that the United States is facing a “category 5” storm with the spread of the variant B.1.1.7. such as variants first identified in South Africa and Brazil.
“We’ll see something we haven’t seen in this country yet,” Osterholm told NBC recently. Meet the press.
Lead author Nicole L. Washington and many of the co-authors are employees of Helix. Other co-authors are Illumina employees. Three co-authors have shares in ILMN.
The work was funded by Illumina, Helix, the Innovative Institute of Genomics (CYC) and the New Frontiers in Research Fund provided by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CYC).
Marcia Frellick is a Chicago-based freelance journalist. She has previously written for the Chicago Tribune, Science News and Nurse.com and was editor of the Chicago Sun-Times, the Cincinnati Enquirer and the St. Cloud (Minnesota) Times. Follow her on Twitter at @mfrellick
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