There are ‘a lot more’ coronavirus variant cases than have been recorded, says Johns Hopkins expert

Nearly 1,300 coronavirus cases caused by variants have been identified in the United States, but there are likely many more than what have been reported, according to a Johns Hopkins expert.

“I don’t think we have the full picture and I think that it’s going to be in the next few weeks that we’ll have a much better idea of what variants are actually out there,” said Gigi Gronvall, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

Viruses are expected to mutate, and the changes can sometimes alter how the disease operates. Influenza mutates very rapidly whereas COVID-19 is changing more slowly.

Some variants, such as the ones that originated in South Africa and the United Kingdom appear to be more contagious.

“I think it’s safe to assume that there are a lot more than what has been recorded,” said Gronvall in a Thursday virtual briefing.

In Massachusetts there have been 34 cases of the United Kingdom variant and one case of the South African variant, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Tracking down variants and thwarting the spread boils down to genomic sequencing, which the CDC is currently ramping up with an influx of federal funding to process up to 25,000 samples a week, as previously reported in the Herald.

The more cases of coronavirus there are, the more chances there are for it to mutate, said Andy Pekosz, a Johns Hopkins virologist.

“If it’s a one in a million chance that the virus can mutate to become better, essentially we’ve let this virus roll the dice 900,000 times because we haven’t been able to control the number of cases that are out there,” said Pekosz.

It’s also possible that other variants will occur in the future that may have similar characteristics to the ones out there now, said Gronvall.

“I think we need to do a much better job of doing genomic sequencing … I think this is going to be a big impact of COVID on the future and how we do epidemiology,” Gronvall said.

The same public health measures such as masking and social distancing are effective in preventing the transmission of variant cases.

Coronavirus vaccines that are currently available have also shown efficacy against the variants, though public health officials have classified vaccination efforts as a race against time in the face of the mutants.

from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/3jZOIKV