On Wednesday, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director, Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said that the U.K. variant of coronavirus was the most prevalent among all the strains found in the U.S. She said that it has now been found in all 50 of the states and two territories in the nation.
In January, the CDC had predicted that B117 the so called “super covid” variant that spread in the U.S. would be the most prevalent one by March. However, its spread was much slower than what was anticipated due to the accelerated pace of vaccinations.
Nearly 50 percent of the new coronavirus cases are emerging from five states: New York, New Jersey, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Florida. According to the health data compiled by Johns Hopkins University these states account for 44 percent of the recent infections and about 197,500 new cases of COVID-19 have been reported.
According to CDC there are only 16,275 confirmed cases of the U.K. variant, 386 cases of the South Africa variant and 356 cases of the Brazil variant. However, the Outbreak website says that about 38 percent of the U.S. cases till April 2 were supposedly due to the U.K. variant.
The vaccine rollout by the Biden administration follows allocation as per the population of the state. As of now there has been no change in this policy.
There is a debate whether states which are seeing a spike should get larger quantities of the vaccine to stem the surge as mentioned by some experts. Other experts believe that this may affect the states that are doing well. It would also make it difficult to explain to these state residents the reason behind the slowdown in vaccinations, if the state is allocated less numbers of vaccines.
Dr. Elvin H Geng, a professor in infectious diseases, Washington University says that the nation should take a step back and go slow. If Americans continued to mask and maintain social distancing, the spread could slow down especially as vaccination eligibility is set to increase by April 19, when all adults across the nation can start registration for their shots as per President Biden’s announcement on Tuesday.
