the variant ‘mu’ of coronavirus, first identified earlier this year in Colombia, has been detected in 49 of the 50 states of United States, As reported by the media ‘Newsweek’.
Less than 1% of confirmed cases of covid-19 in the United States they correspond to the variant ‘mu’, according to the data analyzed by the American medium. However, says ‘Newsweek’, this would have the potential to be more transmissible and to resist vaccines.
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According to outbreak.info, a website that collects information about covid-19 in the world, at least one case of the variant has been detected in 49 US states. Nebraska would be the only territory where it has not yet been identified.
California is the state in which more cases of the ‘mu’ variant have been confirmed, with 384 cases detected among the 139,930 sequenced samples in this state.
However, the highest prevalence of the variant (taking into account the total sequenced samples) is in Alaska. There, 146 cases of ‘mu’ were detected, representing 4% of the total of the 3,837 samples processed.
‘Mu’ was first identified in Colombia by the National Institutes of Health, but would already be circulating 43 countries. The variant has three mutations of interest associated with immune escape and high contagiousness.
(Read also: Five things to know about the ‘mu’ variant identified in Colombia)
Recently, the World Health Organization (WHO) classified ‘mu’, also known as B1,621, as a variant of interest.
For his part, Anthony Fauci, the main epidemiologist of the Government of the United States, said that the country was watching “closely” the variant, but lowered the alarm by indicating that they did not consider it “an immediate threat at this time,” according to EFE.
Fauci also said that the presence of ‘mu’ in the country is not “even close to being dominant”, unlike the delta variant which, he pointed out, is dominant in “more than 99%” of American territory.
for the WHO a variant of interest has a lower neutralization by antibodies that leaves a previous infection, or vaccination, and can proportionally increase the cases in a region.
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THE WEATHER *
* With information from EFE