Iran Press/America: It appears that the agency’s projection is well on its way to becoming true.
The UK variant has continued its rapid spread across the United States over the past month and now accounts for an estimated 10 percent of all cases nationwide. That figure is up from an estimated 1 to 4 percent just a few weeks ago.
According to the latest data compiled by the CDC, the agency has identified twenty-four hundred cases of the UK variant, fifty-three cases of the B.1.351 strain from South Africa, and ten cases of P.1 from Brazil.
"We may now be seeing the beginning effects of these variants in the most recent data," CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said in a recent media briefing.
First seen in southeast England, that new strain is now responsible for the majority of new infections in the United Kingdom and forced the country into national lockdown on January 4.
Previous reports have contended that the mutant virus is about 45 percent more transmissible and up to 70 percent more deadly.
Walensky added that she is really worried about some states rolling back public health measures intended to contain further spread as new cases appear to be leveling off at a “very high number.”
"Seventy thousand cases a day seems good compared to where we were just a few months ago," she said. "Please hear me clearly: At this level of cases with variants spreading, we stand to completely lose the hard-earned ground we have gained."
The United States peaked at more than three hundred thousand cases per day in early January following the winter holidays.
White House chief medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci agreed with the assessment that the number of daily cases still needs to go down substantially.
Viruses like COVID-19 are known to continuously evolve, and what concerns scientists, even more, is that the currently circulating variants might only be the tip of the iceberg, as the United States appears to be incubating a number of its own unique coronavirus variants, recent research has suggested.
The study was able to pinpoint at least seven new lineages of the virus that evolved independently of one another, though they do seem to display the same genetic mutations.
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