CDC: NO SIGN OF U.S. VARIANT, BUT MORE RESEARCH NEEDED

Spotty surveillance complicates effort as virus mutates

Mutations in the novel coronavirus and the sudden appearance of the highly contagious United Kingdom variant have become a top concern of scientists and public health officials in the United States, who are vowing to improve the spotty surveillance of the pathogen as it adapts to its human host and potentially becomes a more elusive target for vaccines.

Infectious-disease experts say there is no evidence the massive winter surge that is killing thousands of people a day in the United States is linked to the U.K. variant or to a homegrown strain. But they acknowledge that their awareness is limited.

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. Like any virus, this one mutates randomly, and countless variants are in circulation.

The increase in the rate of new infections in the United States has been so rapid in recent weeks that scientists cannot rule out the possibility that an undetected variant is accelerating the spread. Other factors may be behind the surge, including holiday gatherings and the lack of adherence in some communities to public health guidelines designed to limit transmission, such as social distancing and wearing masks.

“It could be — a possibility — that we have our own mutant that’s being more easily transmissible,” Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said Monday. “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.”

Nearly 198,000 new coronavirus cases and more than 1,600 deaths were reported Monday in the United States.

Officials in Indiana announced that the U.K. variant has been identified in their state. More than 60 cases of the variant strain have been identified across nine states, including in San Diego, since it was first detected stateside two weeks ago in Colorado.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Monday its strain surveillance program and its partners are on track to more than double by week’s end the number of genomic sequences being uploaded to public databases compared with the sequencing rate in December. The CDC has organized virtual meetings with scientists and public health experts in an attempt to share information about variants of the virus in circulation.

“The general consensus is there’s no single variant driving current U.S. cases. That said, we need to be on the lookout for these variants of concern,” Duncan MacCannell, chief science officer with the CDC’s Office of Advanced Molecular Detection, said Monday.

Other scientists share that view.

“We don’t see any evidence of a particular variant ‘out running ’ others,” Kristian Andersen, an immunologist at the Scripps Research Institute, said in an email. “That’s not to say there isn’t one, but we haven’t seen any evidence of it so far and we are looking, just not enough.”