A variant of the coronavirus that carries some of the same mutations as the highly contagious British variant may have been in the United States since October and was already widespread, suggests a new analysis of more than 2 million tests.
Genome sequencing to confirm whether the variant observed in Americans is the same as the so-called B117 variant currently circulating in the United Kingdom..
Results are expected in a few days, but the revelations have raised new questions about where the altered virus originated, including a small possibility that it started in the United States, not the United Kingdom or anywhere else. place. The variant has also been found in at least 17 countries, including South Korea, Spain, Australia and Canada.
“It wouldn’t be at all surprising that at least some of the cases were B117,” said Eric Topol, head of the Scripps Research Translation Institute in La Jolla, California, who did not participate in the investigation, but the team at the which confirmed a Californian case of variant B117 on Wednesday.
“He’s probably been here for a while at low levels, but you don’t see him until you look for him.”
On December 14, the UK health secretary announced the existence of a highly transmissible Sars CoV-2 variant after Covid testing labs reported that a growing number of their positive samples were missing. a signal from any of the three genes in your PCR. tests are used to confirm the presence of the virus.
Subsequent sequencing revealed that this “abandonment of the S gene” was the result of mutations in the gene encoding the spike protein that the virus uses to access human cells. The variant is believed to have been circulating in the UK since September.
News of the new variant has caused several countries to restrict travel from the UK, or in the case of the US, forcing travelers to show that a Covid-19 negative test is allowed to enter the country. However, the first known cases in the United States were detected earlier this week in Colorado and California, and the suspicion is that it may already be widespread.
In the last hours of December 31, a third state in the United States, Florida, officially reported a case of the coronavirus variant, a man in his twenties in Martin County, north of West Palm Beach, which had no recent travel history. said the department.
To investigate, scientists at California-based DNA testing company Helix examined the prevalence of S-gene abandonment among 2 million Covid tests the company has processed in recent months. They observed an increase in S gene abandonment among positive samples since early October, when 0.25% of positive tests showed this pattern.
This has grown since then, averaging 0.5% last week, although in Massachusetts, which has the highest number of such samples, it currently stands at 1.85%, despite that cases of variant B117 in this state have not yet been reported.
Subsequent analysis revealed mutations in some of the same regions of the S gene that are also present in variant B117, although complete sequencing of the viral genome is needed to confirm whether this is really the same variant or something else.
The coronavirus pandemic is out of control in the United States, with a death toll in 24 hours of more than 3,740 earlier this week meaning the worst day of the outbreak in the country.
Public health experts and Democratic President-elect Joe Biden have warned that the situation will get worse before it gets better, even as vaccines are produced.
Helix is currently collaborating with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as it awaits test results for the variant found in the U.S.
“It simply came to our notice then [B117 variant], then we might be able to see if it was introduced to the United States once or several times, or if it has mutated even further, ”said Nicole Washington, Helix’s associate director of research, whose research was published as to prepress and has not yet been peer-reviewed.
“If all the samples have it, it’s probably been here for a while, but if they only have one or two, it may have been introduced recently and we’re at the beginning of seeing it spread.”
It is also possible that the variant originated in the United States and then spread to the United Kingdom, although it is unlikely, since variant B117 appears to be more common in England, Topol said. “However, I don’t think it should be known as the UK variant because we don’t know where it came from.”
If the B117 is really widely established in the United States, travel bans are unlikely to work, Topol added: “The variant is likely to become dominant. [within the US] in the coming months, so what we need to do is overcome it through a combination of very narrow mitigation measures, including surveillance and testing, and vaccinate as if there is no tomorrow, ”he said. they should work well “.
Even if the variant identified by Helix is not B117, the nature of some of the mutations it contains are worrisome, as they can increase the virus’s ability to infect human cells, added Ravi Gupta, a professor of clinical microbiology. at Cambridge University. , UK, which helped sequence variant B117.
Meanwhile, the United States has fallen far short of the targets set by the U.S. government for the number of people it expected to be vaccinated by the end of 2020.
Top U.S. infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci on Thursday called on the federal government to deploy more resources to vaccinate Americans.
As the state’s underserved and underfunded public health departments struggled to administer the vaccines, some seniors waited overnight to receive the first dose in Florida.
“We would have liked to see it run smoothly and have a dose of 20 million people … by the end of 2020, that was the projection. Viouslybviament didn’t happen, and that’s disappointing,” Fauci told NBC on Thursday .