First case of variant coronavirus detected in Colorado
Scientists say it is more transmissible but does not make people sicker
WASHINGTON — Colorado officials on Tuesday reported the first known case in the United States of a person infected with the coronavirus variant that has been circulating rapidly across much of the United Kingdom and has led to a lockdown of much of southern England.
Scientists believe the variant is more transmissible but does not make people sicker.
The Colorado case involves a male in his 20s who is in isolation in Elbert County, about 50 miles southeast of Denver, who has no travel history, according to a tweet from the office of Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat.
“The individual has no close contacts identified so far but public health officials are working to identify other potential cases and contacts through thorough contact tracing interviews,” the statement said.
A federal scientist familiar with the investigation said the individual’s lack of known travel — in contrast with most confirmed cases outside the United Kingdom — indicates that his probably is not an isolated case. “We can expect that it will be detected elsewhere,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the broader context of the announcement.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed that in a statement Tuesday afternoon, saying additional cases with the new variant will be detected in the U.S. in the coming days. The variant’s apparent increase in contagiousness “could lead to more cases and place greater demand on already strained health care resources,” the agency said.
Researchers have now detected the more transmissible variant in at least 17 countries outside the United
Kingdom, including as far away as Australia and South Korea, as of Tuesday afternoon. Officials in Canada had said they had identified two cases.
While the U.K. variant appears more contagious, it is not leading to higher rates of hospitalizations or deaths, according to a new report from Public Health England, a government agency. Nor is there any sign that people who were infected months ago with the coronavirus are more likely to be reinfected if exposed to the variant, according to the report. All available evidence indicates that vaccines, and immunity built up in the population, should be protective against this variant.
The Colorado case occurred in a county of about 27,000 people, which is currently classified, along with much of the state, in the “red” level for the coronavirus, denoting serious but not extreme risk.
Two weeks ago, several hundred people gathered at a community church in the county seat of Kiowa to consider whether to pursue legal actions against Polis and other state officials for imposing coronavirus-related restrictions, according to the Elbert County News. County commissioners and the county sheriff have declined to enforce restrictions emanating from Denver.
“I was expecting to see it in ski country first because those areas are where people from across Colorado, the U.S. and internationally gather,” said Elizabeth Carlton, an assistant professor of environmental and occupational health at the Colorado School of Public Health. The absence of apparent travel history associated with the infected person, she said, suggests he “can’t be the only case in Colorado.”
Polis, in his statement, called on Coloradans to do everything they could to prevent transmission by wearing masks, standing six feet apart when gathering with others, and interacting only with members of their immediate households.
The arrival of the new variant “doesn’t fundamentally change the nature of the threat,” said Justin Lessler, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “It’s no more deadly than the virus was before, and it doesn’t look like it infects people who are immune.”
Lessler echoed others, saying he would be “astounded” if this were the only chain of transmission of the new variant in the U.S. “We know that the virus spreads easily and quickly between countries,” he said, and the fact that the infected person had no travel history indicates that “this strain has gotten here sometime in the past, and there are chains of transmission ongoing.”
The variant has a higher attack rate, according to the U.K. report, which bolsters the hypothesis that the variant has outcompeted other versions of the coronavirus and is now the dominant variant across much of the United Kingdom. Among people known to have been exposed to someone already infected with the variant, 15.1 percent became infected. People exposed to someone infected with the nonvariant version had a 9.8 percent infection rate.
That difference suggests that the variant is more transmissible, though the health agency said more investigation is needed to bolster the hypothesis.
The working theory among many scientists is that the increased transmissibility of the variant, known as B.1.1.7, is driven by mutations that have altered the spike protein on the surface of the virus. The variant has 17 mutations — eight of which alter the spike protein.