CDC head: COVID-19 mutations may be fueling spike

WASHINGTON — Unidentified variants of the coronavirus that are more contagious than those that first spread in the United States may be fueling an explosion in cases and the rising death toll, Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said Friday.

In an interview with McClatchy, Redfield, who is a virologist, said he wasn’t surprised that highly contagious forms of the virus had emerged with multiple mutations in the United Kingdom and South Africa, and were showing up in the United States.

The U.K. variant drove a nationwide lockdown in Britain, and has been found in at least seven jurisdictions across the United States. The Food and Drug Administration on Friday issued an alert warning that many existing tests may not pick up the coronavirus in its British form, known as B.1.1.7.

A report by the White House coronavirus task force sent to states Friday also raised the suspicion that a U.S. variant could be causing the recent surge. “This fall/winter surge has been at nearly twice the rate of rise of cases as the spring and summer surges,” the report states. “This acceleration suggests there may be a USA variant that has evolved here.”

But multiple unknown variants may be spreading in America, Redfield said, as scientists warn that the United States has done a relatively poor job at tracking genetic changes to the virus compared with other countries.

“We’re fairly confident that there are variants in the U.S. that have a transmission advantage, and we think that’s contributing to the slope of the surge that we’re seeing right now,” Redfield said. “I expect that over the weeks and months ahead a number of variants will be identified.”

“These variants are going to continue to occur, and they are going to have an impact on the pandemic,” he said.

Redfield is confident that the two coronavirus vaccines that have been approved by the FDA for emergency use — produced by Pfizer and Moderna — will work against the new emerging strains. British public health officials have recently expressed concern that the vaccines may not work against the variant discovered in South Africa, which included mutations to the spike protein of the coronavirus that helps it invade human cells.

“We’re kind of in a race in this country to get the American public vaccinated over the next three, four, five, six months,” Redfield said.