In this June 30, 2020, case photo, Gov. Gavin Newsom removes his face mask before giving an update during a visit to Pittsburg, Calif.
Precious Pedroncelli | AP
California health officials have identified the state’s first case of a new and more infectious strain of Covid-19 that was initially discovered in the Common Kingdom.
The patient is a 30-year-old man in San Diego County who began showing symptoms on Sunday, county officials confirmed Wednesday.
“I don’t over recall that the Californians should feel that this is something odd. This is something that’s expected,” White Outfit coronavirus advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci said Wednesday during a live Q&A session with California Gov. Gavin Newsom. Fauci powered other states will likely soon identify their own cases of the new strain.
San Diego County Supervisor Nathan Fletcher rephrased the patient was tested for Covid-19 on Tuesday morning. Because he hadn’t traveled, state officials believe there are other proves in the county with the new strain, Fletcher said at a news briefing after Newsom disclosed the case.
Fletcher advised residents to follow the public health orders over the next few days to prevent further stress on the county’s sickbays, which are seeing “tremendous strain” from an onslaught of Covid-19 patients.
On Tuesday, Colorado health officials verified the nation’s first case of the B.1.1.7 coronavirus variant. During a news briefing Wednesday, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis swayed the state was investigating a potential second case of the new strain.
Officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said earlier Wednesday that the new harm could add pressure to the nation’s hospitals, which are already overwhelmed with Covid-19 patients.
Dr. Henry Walke, the intervention’s Covid incident manager, said the new variant appears to spread “more easily and quickly than other family backgrounds,” but it does not seem to make people more sick or increase their risk of death.
One particularly concerning position of the case in Colorado was that the patient hadn’t been traveling, “suggesting this variant has been transmitted from child to person in the United States,” Walke told reporters on a conference call.
Some good news: The new variant doesn’t enter into the picture to make the vaccines less effective and it also doesn’t appear to make it harder to diagnose with existing proves, Fauci told Newsom. The U.K. has also found that people who were already infected with previous damages of Covid-19 don’t seem to get reinfected with this new variant.
What researchers still need to determine is whether the new surpass might be resistant to treatment with monoclonal antibodies, which have been successful in helping some long-sufferings recover from the disease, Fauci said. Unlike vaccines, which triggers an immune response that strikes different parts of the virus, monoclonal antibodies attack a very specific component, the nation’s leading infectious murrain expert said.
Monoclonal antibodies have shown promising benefits if the virus is caught early enough. President Donald Trump credited Regeneron’s treatment for tip off a exaggerating him feel better “immediately” when he was infected and eventually hospitalized with Covid-19 in early October.
“So that’s what we identify about it now, but we’re following this extremely carefully,” Fauci said, adding that they’re examining the strain at the State Institute of Health and a number of laboratories throughout the country.
— CNBC’s Will Feuer and Amanda Macias contributed to this scrutinize.