⏩ Researcher: Human behaviors the culprit in COVID surge.
A Yale researcher who has been examining COVID variants says the strains are contributing to Connecticut’s spike in cases, but they are not the main culprit.
“It's human behaviors — opening indoor settings to full capacity, letting our guard down on distancing from non-household members, and trying to get back to ‘normal’ too soon,” said Nathan Grubaugh, an assistant professor at the Yale School of Public Health.
“More transmissible variants then make infectious contacts worse, leading to more transmission. We're in a difficult period seeing the end in sight with vaccination, but we could be in for a rough stretch if we start letting up too soon.”
The latest surveillance data on COVID variants in Connecticut shows cases with the strain from the U.K. may be slowing down, while infections with a variant first found in New York are increasing.
As of Thursday, 469 cases of the B.1.1.7 strain from the U.K. have been detected in Connecticut, according to a weekly report released by the Nathan Grubaugh Lab at the Yale School of Public Health. The number of new cases of that variant, which researchers believe is also more likely to result in a patient’s death, shows about a 1 percent decline from the previous week’s report.
Overall, cases of B.1.1.7 comprised a little more than 37 percent of the variants sampled by researchers at Yale and The Jackson Laboratory in the past week.
Grubaugh said Thursday in a tweet accompanying the report that cases of B.1.1.7 may be leveling off.
“While this is good news, I think that it points to something else,” Grubaugh tweeted, referring to a bump in cases of a variant known as B.1.526.
Cases of B.1.526 comprised almost 32 percent of new samples researchers sequenced this week, up more than 9 percent from the previous week.
That strain first emerged in New York in November, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Unlike B.1.1.7, which the agency considers a “variant of concern,” the New York strain is classified as a “variant of interest,” meaning scientists might want to study it’s possible impact, or track its prevalence through genetic sequencing as Connecticut researchers are doing.
Grubaugh said the “proportion is higher” in Fairfield County for the strain from New York.
The primary concerns with B.1.526 are that it could escape
the treatment of patients with monoclonal antibodies, which are given to patients after testing positive for COVID-19 to help the body’s immune system ward off the virus, according to the CDC.
There is also concern it could blunt the impact of immunity from the virus — whether in someone who receives a vaccine or who is infected and recovers.
Last weekend, the state Department of Public Health warned residents of sharply rising cases in the state and pointed out the prevalence of the variant
in the latest infections.
How quickly vaccines can be adjusted to meet rising variants was a question Gov. Ned Lamont asked a Pfizer executive during his COVID news briefing on Thursday.
“The beauty of the mRNA technology is that once you have the genetic sequence of the virus, you can quickly make it and produce a new vaccine,” said Angela Hwang, group president of Pfizer Biopharmaceuticals Group.
She said the company has estimated it could make a new vaccine within 116 days, or give recipients a booster shot of the current vaccine to give their bodies a bump in immunity.
Grubaugh said researchers also believe there’s evidence the P.1 variant, first detected in Brazil, and B.1.351 variant first detected in South Africa could be spreading locally in Connecticut. But with other variants now circulating, it’s unclear if either will gain a foothold in the state, he said.
Both those variants contain the E484K mutation, which researchers believe could help them evade the body’s immune response to the virus. That could potentially blunt the impact of vaccinating people.
Hwang noted that Pfizer recently found its vaccine to be 100 percent effective against the South African variant.
A little more than 19 percent of all the variants detected in this week’s report from Yale contained the mutation. But the level of risk that poses remains uncertain.
“In my opinion, this is probably the most important question that we are currently facing, and I don't know the answer yet,” Grubaugh said in an email.
Much of his research is focused on figuring out whether there are variants that can break through the vaccine, he said, noting that because none of the vaccines provide perfect protection against the virus, they do expect some inoculated people to get infected.
“We want to know if viruses with the E484K mutation are over-represented in this group compared to the unvaccinated population,” he said.