Florida has nearly half of the known cases in the United States

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. – The Centers for Disease Control says Florida has nearly half of all known cases in the United States of a mutated and probably more contagious strain of coronavirus.

That news comes when Florida broke the previous record of a single day of coronavirus cases and added about 20,000 infected people to its case load on Thursday.

The variant that emerged in Britain was detected last week in a twenty-year-old Martin County man.

The CDC says Florida now has 22 cases of the mutated virus. California has 26 cases, Colorado has 2 and New York and Georgia have reported 1 case of the new variant.

Click here to see the CDC case map caused by variants.

The map does not break down the specific counties or locations of the state in which the variant was reported.

Florida has broken the record single-day increase in COVID-19 cases two days in a row, and state health officials reported an additional 19,816 cases on Thursday after 17,783 new cases Wednesday.

Miami-Dade County on Thursday accounted for 3,373 of the new confirmed cases in Florida.

The World Health Organization says scientists first detected the British variant in September. Doctors are still investigating the variant, but it is believed that the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are still effective.

Dr. Aileen Marty, an infectious disease expert at Florida International University, told Local 10 News earlier this week that studies comparing the blood of people who have recovered from the original strain with the variant show that those who developed good antibodies had antibodies that also appear to neutralize the new strain.

“Based on that, we are pretty confident that vaccines today, with the current new UK variant, will still be very effective,” he said. “We have to do studies with people who have had the vaccines to be 100% sure of that, but it seems very, very good, because we already know that these vaccines are producing better quality immunity than even that of have had the virus “.

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