Deputy Secretary of Health and Human Services Brett Giroir said on Monday that a new, more rapidly spreading coronavirus strain found in the UK “is likely” to be already present in the US, although he warned that officials still have no evidence of his presence.
In an interview with Good Morning America, Giroir warned that authorities suspect that the new mutation in the virus has already made the leap from the UK to the US despite the United States and more than a dozen countries implementing travel restrictions.
“We have no evidence that he is here, but we suspect he is likely to be here, given the global interconnection,” Giroir said. “We don’t have evidence that it’s here. It’s certainly not widespread here, but we have to look and make sure it’s not here.”
“And we still believe, we don’t have absolute evidence, but we have very good evidence and we believe the vaccines will be effective,” Giroir added.
Giroir went on to say that while the new COVID-19 strain is believed to be spreading at a faster rate, there is “no evidence that it is more serious” than the version that is spreading in the United States. for months.
His comments echoed those of former Food and Drug Administration chief Scott Gottlieb, who told CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday that the new COVID-19 strain is probably here in the United States. United ”in a“ reasonable ”number of people.
“We don’t sequence a lot of samples in this country and a lot of sequencing that is done is done in private labs and not added to public databases. That needs to be fixed,” Gottlieb said about testing problems that complicated efforts. of the United States to track the new tension. “In the UK they sequence about 10 per cent of all samples. Here we are doing a fraction of 1 per cent.”
Canadian officials revealed Saturday that they had detected two cases of the new strain COVID-19, which appeared in a couple with no history of travel or known exposure to the virus.
The United States approved 19 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 on Sunday, while more than 320,000 have died from the virus nationwide.