A new more highly contagious strain of the coronavirus, first identified in the United Kingdom, is spreading in the United States Last week Texas, Pennsylvania and Connecticut announced they had detected the new strain, joining California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, and New York.
And while the Massachusetts Department of Public Health said on Monday that no labs in the state had detected evidence of variant strains yet, Gov. Charlie Baker has said that his administration is assuming the more contagious mutation is already here.
Dr. William Hanage, an associate professor of epidemiology at Harvard's T.H. Chan School of Public Health, agrees with Baker.
“There are increasing numbers coming in from all over the country,” Hanage said. “So we can be pretty sure that it's here. But the great thing is that right now it's rare. And what that means is that we can do stuff to keep it rare.”
Hanage said that while the new U.K. coronavirus strain, officially known as B.1.1.7, is around 50 percent more transmissible, it doesn’t appear to cause more severe disease.
And he said that, the more transmissible something is, the more of the population needs to be vaccinated in order to control it. It apears that the newly-approved vaccines will be effective against the new strain, too, Hanage added.
So what can we do to contain new strain?
Several Massachusetts epidemiologists agree that current safety measures can keep the new strain from running rampant and causing hospitalizations and deaths to rise even higher.
“All the tools we have now will work and will continue to work,” said epidemiologist Andrew Lover of the UMass Amherst School of Public Health and Health Sciences. “It's just the level of adherence and attention to detail has to be that much higher.”
“So if you've been going to the grocery twice a week or three times a week, you know, really think carefully about doing a single trip," Lover said, reiterating that masks remain an important tool to fight transmission of the virus. "So I think it's going to be taking a more cautious approach, and really thinking carefully about all of your activities in detail, and then trying to minimize any mixing with people outside of your bubble.”
The new B.1.1.7 strain is one of several new strains detected recently, including one in South Africa, but they all share common features. Lover said the new strain's increased contagiousness seems to come from a change to the virus’ spike protein that makes it easier for the virus to get a foothold inside a person’s body when it’s inhaled. He also said data from the U.K. show that people have ten to 100 times more virus in their nose and mouth with the new strain.
But none of that means the virus can get through a mask any easier or last longer in the air, says Dr. Joshua Barocas, an assistant professor of medicine at Boston University School of Medicine and an infectious disease physician at Boston Medical Center.
“We have to remember that we all are tired,” Barocas said, “This has been an exhausting experience and a traumatic experience for nearly everyone. And so myself and other public health professionals and government officials need to say, ‘Listen, we understand that you're tired. Here are the things that you can do to keep yourself safer.’ Safer means trying your best to wear that mask when you're at the grocery store, knowing that maybe you are going to end up standing four feet away instead of six feet away.”
Barocas said in the face of the new more contagious coronavirus strain, it’s important to get people to reduce their risk, not necessarily to roll back to more stringent shutdowns.
The new strain was identified in the U.K. with the help of a robust virus surveillance program, and Barocas says a national surveillance program here, to track genomic variants of viruses and bacteria, would be “incredibly useful.”
“[It] would help us with not just this pandemic, but pandemic preparedness in general,” Barocas said. “I think that should be a priority for the Biden administration. Improving our infectious disease surveillance infrastructure is vital to getting through this pandemic. But most certainly it is vital to preventing the next one, and being prepared in the event that we're unable to prevent the next.”
Hanage said 2021 should end in a better place, but he urged caution.
“The numbers of deaths per capita in Massachusetts are getting close to the point where one in 500 residents of the state has died from the pandemic already,” Hanage said. “And you know that the cases are continuing to accumulate and climb. ... We have time to go until the vaccine is rolled out. ... Even though we have reason to be hopeful in due course, that's no reason to let our guard down now.”
