Mutant British variant of coronavirus ‘is probably already in the US’

The mutant British strain of coronavirus is probably already in the United States and could even have originated there, scientists and politicians have said. 

The new strain – feared to be 70 per cent more transmissible and to spread more easily among children – has led to calls for the US to impose a travel ban on Britain, as dozens of countries including Canada have already done.   

Dr Anthony Fauci said the strain ‘very well might be here for all we know’, while New York governor Andrew Cuomo said he believed it had already reached the US. 

Scott Gottlieb, a former head of the FDA, told CNBC that the new strain ‘is already in the US’ and that a travel ban would not keep it out. ‘As the virus continues to spread around the world, we’re going to start to see more of these variants,’ he warned.   

Jeremy Luban, a University of Massachusetts virologist, told the Washington Post that the new strain ‘may have even started here’ – suggesting it might have been detected in Britain first because the UK has a better genome sequencing program.   

The mutation has been blamed by UK politicians for a resurgence in cases in the south of England which seemed to defy a national lockdown in November. But other experts have played down concerns, saying the 70 per cent claim is unproven.  

Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the Georgetown Center for Global Health Science and Security, said it would ‘not shock me at all to find out’ that the strain is in the US.

‘I don’t think a travel ban is going to be particularly helpful. We already have out-of-control transmission of all the variants that are circulating in the US here,’ she said.  

Cuomo said on Monday that the new strain was ‘another disaster waiting to happen’ after New York was hit hard by the first wave of the pandemic in the spring.

‘When you do not require flights from the UK to be tested, you are allowing thousands of UK passengers to arrive here every day,’ Cuomo said. 

‘Based on New York’s experience in the spring, I believe this new, highly contagious strain of Covid-19 is already here,’ he added. 

Virgin Atlantic, British Airways and Delta Airlines have already agreed to test all passengers for Covid-19 prior to boarding UK flights for New York. 

The US government is considering a new rule that would require all passengers arriving from the UK to have a negative test within 72 hours of departure. 

The White House coronavirus task force discussed such a move after a meeting on Monday about the emergence of the new strain, officials said. 

Canada has already imposed a 72-hour ban on arrivals from the UK, making it one of more than 40 countries to have shut down travel from Britain.  

Outside the UK, cases of the new strain have already been identified in Denmark, Gibraltar, the Netherlands, Australia and Italy.  

The rush to shut down flights came after UK prime minister Boris Johnson sounded the alarm over the new strain at a Saturday press conference.   

Blaming the threat of the new strain, Johnson put millions of people back into lockdown in England and drastically tightened Christmas rules for others.

Johnson said the UK was ‘fairly certain the variant is transmitted more quickly, saying that ‘it may be up to 70 per cent more transmissible than the old variant’. 

The UK government believes the new variant may explain why cases kept rising in parts of England even when the country was in lockdown throughout November. 

Unlike during the first wave, schools stayed open during the November shutdown – and experts have said the new strain may spread more easily among children.

‘There is a hint that it has a higher propensity to infect children,’ said Neil Ferguson, an epidemiologist at University College London and member of an advisory panel.

‘We haven’t established any sort of causality on that, but we can see it in the data,’ Ferguson said. ‘We will need to gather more data to see how it behaves going forward.’ 

Ferguson, known as ‘Professor Lockdown’, was seen as instrumental in the UK’s March restrictions but stepped down from his advisory position after he flaunted the guidance he helped implement to visit his married lover.   

Peter Horby, the chair of the New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group, said scientists have ‘high confidence that this variant does have a transmission advantage over other virus variants that are currently in the UK’. 

Scientists said the new variant had swiftly become the dominant strain in the south of England, and could soon do the same across the country. 

UK health secretary Matt Hancock said the new strain is ‘out of control’ in the parts of Britain, including London, which are now back in lockdown. 

To add to the misery in Britain, the border closures have caused massive queues of lorries unable to get into France, causing concerns about food supplies.  

However, politicians and scientists have said there is no evidence that the new strain is more deadly, or that it could interfere with the vaccines already developed. 

‘There’s zero evidence that there’s any increase in severity’ from the lat est strain, the WHO’s emergencies chief Dr Michael Ryan said on Monday. 

Dr Fauci echoed the finding, also made by the German government, that there is no indication of a threat to the vaccine’s effectiveness. 

‘Having said all of that, when you’re dealing with mutations, you have to follow them very closely and don’t take them lightly,’ Fauci said.  

Admiral Brett Giroir, the US assistant secretary for health, said the new strain ‘has become of concern because it is becoming the dominant variant in the UK’. 

‘The inference is that because it is the dominant variant, it may be more transmissible – and that may be true. It has not been proven but it may be true,’ he told CNN. 

In addition to all of this, South Africa also says it has identified its own new variant which it it is likewise blaming for a rebound in the infection rate. 

South African health authorities said the new variant seemed to spread faster than the previous iteration, but it is not the same strain as the British one. 

‘In the UK they have also identified a new variant… there are quite a few similarities between the two lineages… there are also a similar number of mutations’ said Professor Tulio de Oliviera, a member of South Africa’s genomics consortium. 

South Africa’s infection rate has more than doubled over the past two weeks, from 6.47 new cases per 100,000 people two weeks ago to 14.68 on Sunday. 

Some Covid-19 vaccines, including the one developed by Oxford University and AstraZeneca, are undergoing clinical tests in South Africa. 

While Britain has voiced alarm over its new strain, a top virologist in Germany yesterday played down fears and questioned whether it was more transmissible. 

Christian Drosten said the 70 per cent figure was ‘simply called that’, suggesting that preliminary scientific estimates might have been overblown by politicians.  

‘I wonder whether a scientist gave an estimate, perhaps asked what he would say if he had to give a figure, and then it takes on a life of its own. Then it enters politics and politicians use this figure and the media takes it up,’ Drosten said. 

‘Suddenly there’s a figure out there, 70 per cent, and nobody even knows what it means,’ he told Deutschlandfunk radio.  

Drosten, the director of virology at Berlin’s Charite Hospital, said it was unclear whether the surge in cases in England was really caused by the new strain at all.

He said the new strain might simply have ‘come to the surface’ during a rise in cases which could have happened for other reasons. 

‘The question is – was it the virus’s fault, or was it simply that in the area where this virus happened to be… methods of transmission came into play which would have brought any other virus to the surface?,’ he asked. 

While it is generally assumed the new strain originated in Britain, Professor Luban argued that this might simply reflect the UK’s better monitoring systems. 

Boris Johnson boasted on Saturday that Britain ‘has by far the best genomic sequencing ability in the world, which means we are better able to identify new strains like this than any other country’. 

Virus mutations are common, and have been occurring throughout the pandemic in a process which is ‘natural and expected’, the WHO said.   

‘Most of the mutations are trivial. It’s the change of one or two letters in the genetic alphabet that doesn’t make much difference in the ability to cause disease,’ said Dr Philip Landrigan, a former CDC scientist.

However, the current mutation has many mutations – nearly two dozen – of which eight are on the spike protein that the virus uses to infect cells.  

Contradicting some scientists, Landrigan said it would be ‘very, very sensible to restrict travel’ from the UK in order to slow the spread of the new strain.  

Fears over the possible impact in America come with deaths rising in 19 states and hospitals close to capacity in California. 

Data from the Covid Tracking Project shows 18,359 people in hospital in California as of Monday, with only 30 intensive care beds said to be available in Los Angeles. 

All of Southern California and the 12-county San Joaquin Valley to the north have been out of regular ICU capacity for days. 

Los Angeles County’s health services director, Dr Christina Ghaly, said plans for rationing care need to be established because ‘the worst is yet to come’.  

A document recently circulated among LA hospitals said that instead of trying to save every life, the goal could shift to saving as many as possible – meaning those less likely to survive would not get the same kind of care. 

‘Some compromise of standard of care is unavoidable,’ warned a document obtained by the Los Angeles Times. 

‘It is not that an entity, system or locale chooses to limit resources, it is that the resources are clearly not available to provide care in a regular manner.’ 

California’s death toll is up by 43 per cent in the last week, while in Alabama it has risen by 58 per cent and in Delaware by 139 per cent.   

Across the country, the US recorded 1,485 deaths and 178,000 cases on Monday, while a record total of 115,351 people are currently hospitalized with the virus. 

Also on Monday, president-elect Joe Biden received his first dose of the vaccine on live television as part of a growing effort to convince people the jabs are safe. 

Biden, 78, took a dose of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine at a hospital not far from his Delaware home, hours after his wife, Jill Biden, did the same. 

The injections came the same day that a second vaccine, produced by Moderna, will start arriving in states.