2 more cases of South African variant reported
Days after the state reported its first case of the South African coronavirus variant, Maryland officials announced two more infections Tuesday.
The latest cases of the B.1.351 variant were people who live in Montgomery County, whereas the first case, reported Saturday, was a person in the Baltimore Metropolitan Area.
Unlike the first case, the two people who contracted the new strain of the disease had recently traveled abroad, Gov. Larry Hogan said in a tweet.
“Contact tracing is underway, and close contacts are isolating,” the Republican governor wrote.
The so-called South African variant is not believed to cause more severe sickness, however it’s believed to be more contagious than COVID-19 and there is evidence that the strain is more resistant to some of the most effective treatments, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Doctors are also concerned about the strain because two vaccines in development by Novavax and Johnson & Johnson have proved less effective against it.
Experts say it’s critical for people to get vaccinated when the immunizations are made available to them.
“We need to do all that we can to drop community transmission to give the variants less room to become predominant, and vaccination is a tool for that,” said Gigi Gronvall, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security who specializes in immunology.
“I’ve heard a lot of people say, ‘Well there’s variants now, so I don’t know if I’m gonna bother getting the vaccine.’ It’s like — get the vaccine. Get it when you can,” Gronvall continued.
There’s also worry among experts that the variant is spreading in Maryland because the first case was not linked to international travel, suggesting someone had contracted it in the community.
Dr. Cliff Mitchell, the director of the Maryland Department of Health’s Environment Health Bureau, said the success of a variant spreading depends on its ability to compete with the dominant strain of the virus and a more transmittable variant has a “competitive advantage” over the dominant strain.
“Inevitably when a virus gets a foothold in a population, it will in most cases spread beyond the primary group to others who are indirectly linked to that primary source,” Mitchell said. He compared variants to COVID-19 in Maryland, noting the disease was first linked to international travel. “Once it gets into the population, it fairly quickly at this moment in time, has the opportunity to find other hosts who did not travel,” Mitchell said.
And the South African variant is not the first coronavirus mutation detected in Maryland. Officials detected the strain B.1.1.7, which is known as the U.K. variant, on Jan. 12. Seven people had contracted the more contagious variant as of Saturday. There is no evidence the vaccines are less effective against the U.K. variant, which is believed to be prominent around the country.