As the Olympics have conclude, Team U.S. has topped the total medal and the gold medal tally, making and breaking a few records to the nation’s delight. However, Florida is breaking records to the nation’s peril as record-breaking cases of COVID-19 due to the delta variant have been reported for the third time this week. Meanwhile, the Lambada variant, a variant which was first seen in Peru is currently present in over a thousand cases across the nation.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Florida reported a record number of cases – 23,903 on Friday. Earlier in the week it reported 22,783 cases on Thursday. On July 31, CDC data reported that there were 21,683 new cases of COVID-19.
Data from the Department of Health and Human Services indicated that hospitalization rates due to COVID-19 in the Sunshine State had also reached record- breaking levels from the past six days. Although Gov. Roy DeSantis has not mandated the use of masks and the vaccine drive is average, many individual counties, institutions and services are requesting people to put on masks and get vaccinated.
As the delta variant of the coronavirus ravages through the U.S., especially among the unvaccinated, a new variant called the lambada variant is responsible for new coronavirus cases. It was originally discovered in Peru in 2020. According to GISAID, a global science initiative, this variant has spread across eight countries in South America and 41 countries across the world.
The CDC told Newsweek that the percentage of Lambada (C.37) cases in the U.S. is currently very low at 0.17 percent. A CDC spokesperson said that there were 1,300 Lambada sequences in U.S. as of August 4, 2021, and the variant had been detected in 44 states. As of now, more than 93 percent of COVID-19 cases in the U.S. are due to the delta variant of the coronavirus. Those who are unvaccinated are more easily infected with the delta variant.
Last week the World Health Organization’s (WHO) technical head Maria Van Kerkhove said that the lambada variant was still a “variant of interest” (VOI) and would be classified as a “variant of concern” (VOC) only if it increased in severity or it had some kind of impact on their countermeasures.
The SARS-Cov-2 Interagency Group (SIG). which is a group that includes the CDC, the National Institutes of Health and other federal agencies, said that it has not classified the lambada variant as a VOI or a VOC though they would continue to monitor its activities across the nation
