Testing has begun in Los Angeles County to determine if the more infectious strain of COVID-19 being found in patients in Britain is now in the West Coast.
“When I spoke with the state Department of Public Health, they indicated that they’ve been looking and didn’t think they had seen the new strain," L.A. County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer told The Los Angeles Times in an interview published Friday. "But you know, you have to know what you’re looking for. So I think everyone at this point that’s seeing these kinds of surges is obviously looking to see, ‘Do we have that particular variant?’”
She confirmed that a public health laboratory has been conducting gene sequencing to test virus samples.
The county has been seeing a large surge of cases, with 13,600 new ones tallied on Thursday alone and 148 people dying that day.
Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti told The Times that the surge has happened "devastatingly quickly."
"Everybody I talked to said this acceleration was beyond any model and any expectation, so then people say ‘What broke down?’ and I’ve got to think it’s partly the strain that was out there,” he said.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said this week the new strain may have already been circulating in the United States. According to a study by the Center for Mathematical Modeling of Infectious Diseases at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, it is 56% more contagious than the original strain.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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