“Super COVID” Is Spreading In The United States – Should We Be Scared?
By Francesco Abbruzzino
This pandemic just entered an alarming new phase. The new mutant strain of the virus commonly known as “Super COVID” has been creating a tremendous amount of panic in the UK, and cases have also been confirmed in Canada, Italy, France, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Denmark, the Netherlands, Australia, Japan, Singapore, India, Lebanon and the United Arab Emirates. But until Tuesday there were no known cases in the United States, and many were urging for travel restrictions to be instituted in order to keep it from gaining a foothold here. Unfortunately, it appears that it is now too late for that, because a case of “Super COVID” has now been identified in Colorado…
Colorado has announced it has detected the first US case of the super-COVID strain that was first found in the UK.
Governor Jared Polis revealed the worrying news in a tweet, writing: ‘Today we discovered Colorado’s first case of the COVID-19 variant B.1.1.7, the same variant discovered in the UK. The health and safety of Coloradans is our top priority and we will monitor this case, as well as all COVID-19 indicators, very closely.’
If this individual had traveled out of the country recently, it would have been easy to assume that he caught it while abroad, but we are being told that he “has no travel history”…
The patient is a man in his 20s who is recovering in isolationin Elbert County, outside Denver. He has no travel history and no close contacts. Public health officials were conducting an investigation.
So that means that he caught “Super COVID” from someone else here in the United States.
And that means that we have probably already lost any chance of containing it.
But that doesn’t mean that we should be scared of this new mutant strain.
Scientists in the UK insist that this strain is “70 percent more infectious”, and that might explain why the case numbers in the UK are exploding right now.
However, on the CDC website we are being told that “there is no evidence that this variant causes more severe illness or increased risk of death”.
So that is good news.
Moving forward, health authorities will be watching carefully to see if “Super COVID” ends up becoming the dominant strain here in the United States. Unfortunately, that appears to be precisely what is taking place in the UK…
It was first spotted in September in southeastern England. The new variant accounted for a quarter of cases in London by November. By the week of Dec. 9, it was responsible for 60% of cases in the city. London and large areas of southern England are under lockdown measures, and dozens of nations have banned travel from the U.K.