The main epidemiologist of the United States Government, Anthony Fauci, assured Monday that takes “very seriously” the new variant of coronavirus detected in New York, which would have originated in Washington Heights, an area in the highest area of Manhattan.
Fauci asserted that officials must “watch over” the new strain, variant B.1.526, which appeared in November and currently represents one in four viral sequences, reports NBC.
Likewise, the epidemiologist has asked that the possibility that the variant may evade the protection of vaccines and antibody treatments be taken into account, according to recent research. “We have to really watch out for that because of its ability to evade both monoclonal antibodies and, to some extent, vaccine-induced antibodies,” precise.
The new variant, which would have arisen in immunosuppressed people who remained ill for a long period, has expanded its reach in the country in the last two weeks and accumulates 735 confirmed cases in up to fifteen statesAlthough most have been diagnosed in New York and New York, according to Bloomberg.
In this sense, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of the United States (CDC, for its acronym in English), Rochelle Walensky, has acknowledged being “really concerned” about some states in which the containment measures of Covid-19 are retreating while the cases in the country are 70,000 a day, “a very high number”, has warned.
“Please listen clearly: at this level of cases with spreading variants, we may completely lose our hard-won ground”, has appealed to the American population.
Apart from variant B.1.526, the health authorities monitor four other variants, the one detected in the United Kingdom, which has left at least 2,400 cases; the one identified for the first time in South Africa, which totals more than fifty; that of Brazil, with a dozen cases; and another called B.1.427 / B.1.429, which is being monitored by California scientists.
According to data from Johns Hopkins University, United States accumulates 38,659,784 cases of Covid-19 and 514,333 deaths since the pandemic broke out.
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