NEW YORK CITY — As the race to vaccinate the region continues, the threat of virus variants from other countries poses a real risk at home. There are concerns that New York City has been slow to detect these more contagious mutations.
Hospitalizations have declined across the tri-state in recent weeks after a holiday surge. However, three COVID-19 mutations have arrived in the United States from the United Kingdom, South Africa, and Brazil.
"Variants remain a matter of great concern and we continue to detect them in the United States, with at least 33 jurisdictions reporting 471 variant cases as of January 31. 467 of these cases have now been detected for the first time in the UK Cases of the B117 variant have been detected in 32 states, CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said. "
Two states have reported the B-1351 variant first discovered in South Africa. Minnesota has also found a case of the P-1 variant, the first detected in Brazil.
"Viruses can't mutate if they don't replicate," Dr. Anthony Fauci said, which is why he emphasized vaccination and mitigation measures are so important.
There are questions about whether the city has an accurate picture of how widespread these new contagious COVID-19 mutations are — the state has only reported a handful of cases of the U.K. variant.
"The safest thing for us to do is to assume that there are many more cases of these variants than we know," said Dr. Jay Varma, senior health adviser at City Hall.
According to the New York Times, the city has conducted almost no testing for virus variants. Only 1% of daily cases were studied on average last month.
But city scientists at the Epidemic Response Laboratory are working on better plans to conduct ten times the research by the end of February, according to Varma.
"We are acting in a very proactive way to ensure that we are both monitoring what has happened to date and increasing the level of monitoring to match the urgency of the threat," he said.
Many experts worry that threats from variants could become the dominant strain before herd immunity is reached.
“I’m not being alarmist, but this is as scary as I’ve been since the beginning of the pandemic,” warned Dr. Celine Gounder, an infectious disease expert at NYU Langone on President Biden’s COVID-19 task force.
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