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Washington, DC has reported its first cases of two highly contagious varieties of “Super-COVID” invading the United States.
Dr. LaQuandra Nesbitt, director of the District of Columbia Department of Health, announced Thursday that three residents have the British variant and one patient has the South African variant.
No information was released about the residents, including their age, gender, or ethnicity, and it is also not clear whether they had a travel history.
Nesbitt said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) informed them last night of the variants discovered in the country’s capital, and there could be many more cases as not every positive test is genome sequenced.
“It wasn’t about if, but when … This is not surprising to DC Health, just another opportunity to remind us to be careful about our behavior,” said Nesbitt.
According to a DailyMail.com analysis of federal and state data, at least 950 cases of the variants have been reported from the UK, South Africa and Brazil in 35 states and DC.
So far there have been two deaths, one in New Jersey and one in Alabama, both of which are related to the British variant B 1.1.7.
On Thursday, Washington, DC announced its first cases of coronavirus variants. Three confirmed the variant originated in the UK and one resident of South Africa for a total of 950 cases in the US (above).
All variants have mutations in their spike protein (circled in yellow) that make it more contagious, re-infectable, and possibly more immune to vaccines
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