Infectious disease experts recently said there is no evidence the winter surge of COVID-19 cases across the country is linked to the new United Kingdom variant or any homegrown COVID-19 variant, The Washington Post reports.
- However, the health officials said more research needs to be done on the subject since some states “have minimal capacity to conduct genomic sequencing that allows scientists to trace the random mutations that could give a virus variant some advantage over other strains,” according to The Washington Post.
Dr. Anthony Fauci didn’t leave out the possibility that there’s another mutation out there, though.
- “It could be — a possibility — that we have our own mutant that’s being more easily transmissible,” he said, per The Washington Post. “We don’t know. We’re looking for it. . . . If you look at the slope of our curve, which is very steep, it looks a bit like the curve in the U.K.”
A U.S. variant?
A White House coronavirus task force report suggests there might be a variant COVID-19 unique to the United States.
- “This fall/winter surge has been at nearly twice the rate of rise of cases as the spring and summer surges,” according to the White House task force document, according to NBC News. “This acceleration suggests there may be a USA variant that has evolved here, in addition to the U.K. variant that is already spreading in our communities and may be 50% more transmissible.”
- However, the CDC said “to date, neither researchers nor analysts at CDC have seen the emergence of a particular variant in the United States as has been seen with the emergence” of a COVID-19 variant, per NBC News.