SAN JOSE – A potentially more infectious variant of COVID-19 that is spreading more and more throughout California is now “relatively common” in Santa Clara County, where it has contributed to the famous Christmas Day outbreak in an emergency room. Kaiser and many other outbreaks.
“The variant has been identified in cases from many of these settings, including cases associated with the Kaiser outbreak, outbreaks of specialized nursing facilities, cases in prisons and shelters, and samples of community testing sites,” said the county in a statement sent to that news organization Monday.
“This suggests that the variant is now relatively common in our community,” the statement adds.
On Sunday evening, the county’s public health officer, Dr. Sara Cody, joined state health officials and other health officials in announcing that variant 452R was behind several South Bay outbreaks. , including one in which at least 74 Kaiser employees and 15 patients were infected in the emergency room of South San Jose Hospital.
A hospital receptionist died from the Kaiser outbreak, which has been largely attributed to an employee who made an unannounced visit to the emergency room to bring holiday spirit. He wore an inflatable Christmas tree costume that may have spread the virus because it used energy-circulating air.
Kaiser confirmed the presence of 452R in the outbreak in a statement Monday, adding that those who tested positive “have now passed the contagious period and have no symptoms.”
At Sunday’s press conference, Santa Clara County officials did not formally link any other outbreak to the variant, including a series of grains in county prisons and one that affected the State University football team. San Jose before he played and lost a bowl game at the end of a season of historic success.
Monday’s statement linked the tension to the other outbreaks, though not to the football team.
In addition to Santa Clara County, variant 452R has been detected in Humboldt, Lake, Los Angeles, Mono, Monterey, Orange, Riverside, San Francisco, San Bernardino, San Diego and San Luis Obispo counties.
Cody said more and more of the 452R strain is detected in South Bay because Santa Clara County is conducting more genomic sequencing than most other California counties.
“We’ve been looking for more and therefore more finding,” he said.
News of the spreading variant comes as virus trends show some positive signs, as the rise in COVID-19 cases and deaths reported in California on Sunday has slowed for some time. week. At about 39,700 a day, the average daily count of cases in California has dropped by about 11% last week. The state still averages about 513 fatalities a day (more than one every three minutes), but that’s only 7% more than a week ago, compared to a 43.5% increase a week. previous.
Scientists at the University of Washington who maintain one of the most widely used and respected computer models for outbreak monitoring and screening also say new infections appear to have peaked over the past week in the United States and large states. , including California.
But the positive assessment is based on the public adhering to social distancing, avoiding meetings and continuing to wear masks, as well as the absence of a vaccine-resistant virus strain and a much improved vaccine distribution.
Meanwhile, the inoculation effort, which has already been rocky, hit another problem after a group of people suffered severe allergic reactions to a batch of Modern vaccines in Southern California, prompting Dr. Erica Pan, the state’s leading epidemiologist, recommended that hundreds of thousands of doses be on hold.
More than 330,000 doses of this batch were distributed statewide and Santa Clara County was among several jurisdictions to announce that they were stopping. The county said in a press release that it has no indication that any of the 21,800 doses of the scrutinized lot that ended with South Bay health care providers have been administered.
Cody said the extent to which the variant included in the Kaiser outbreak is still being investigated with the help of the state Department of Public Health and the National Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“It was a very unusual outbreak with a lot of disease and it seemed to spread pretty quickly,” he said. “We are trying to understand whether the characteristics of this outbreak are due to this variant … or it has to do with other factors present in this hospital.”
Both Kaiser and public health officials stress that the increase in the mutated strain does not guarantee a change in existing safety protocols and practices to prevent the recruitment of COVID-19.
“At the moment we have no sign that this variant is associated with anything else, such as the increasing severity of the disease, although of course we are looking for any sign to see if this would arise,” he said. Cody.
The latter variant is different from variant B.1.1.7, a more contagious strain first detected in the UK. Dr. Charles Chiu, a virologist and professor of laboratory medicine at UC San Francisco, noted the “very high attack rate” of the variant that in some outbreaks being studied caused infection scenarios of the “80 and 90 percent. “
Chiu said in an interview Sunday night that the first case of the variant in California was discovered in May in Alameda County. But from mid-November to the last two weeks of December, the number of COVID-19 cases related to the strain went from 3.8% to 25%.
“It’s worrying that it could be more infectious,” Chiu said in a later briefing, stressing the need for more research to determine how quickly it can be transmitted.
Staff writers Evan Webeck, Lisa M. Krieger, John Woolfolk, Elliott Almond, and Julia Prodis Sulek contributed to this report.