The ‘UK variant’ of the COVID virus is making gains in Florida, now up to 5% of cases
The more infectious spin-off of the COVID virus known as the U.K. variant is gaining a foothold in Florida, where it accounts for about 5% of cases, according to an estimate by the commercial lab that has analyzed the bulk of the cases of the mutated virus in the state.
That’s up from about 1% of cases in Florida a month ago, according to estimates by Helix, a California-based genomics and diagnostics company that runs about 25,000 COVID tests a week pulled from more than 90% of the state’s ZIP codes. The company is responsible for flagging 84 of Florida’s 147 known cases caused by the U.K. variant, or B.1.1.7. The strain is thought to be spreading throughout the state, though cases are concentrated in South Florida.
The rapidly growing percentage of Florida COVID cases caused by the variant is “dismaying, but not unexpected,” said Gigi Gronvall, an immunologist and senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.
“People were expecting it to become the predominant strain, and here’s evidence that it’s well on its way in Florida,” she said.
South Florida counties lead the state with the most known cases of the variant: Miami-Dade with 35, Broward with 39, and Palm Beach with 17, according to the Florida Department of Health Hillsborough and Pinellas counties in the Tampa Bay area have 16 and 12 known cases, respectively. The rest of the counties in Florida have six known cases or less.
The U.K. strain, which scientists believe is significantly more transmissible, is outpacing other versions of the virus and becoming the predominant strain in several countries. Federal health officials predicted last month that it would become the most common version of the virus in the U.S. by March.
That’s not to say there’s no competition. Versions of the virus from South Africa and Brazil, which are thought to have potential implications for the potency of COVID vaccines, have also been discovered in the U.S., though not yet in Florida.
The U.K. variant is establishing itself in Florida at a time when COVID cases and hospitalizations are falling, but Gronvall said that could change.
“[The strain] does not appear that it results in more serious disease, so from an individual perspective, it’s not much worse than it was before,” Gronvall said. “But from a medical perspective, this downturn in cases [in Florida] is threatened by variants that make it more transmissible.”
To better monitor for mutated versions of the virus, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has partnered with private laboratories run by Helix, Quest and LabCorp to get COVID virus samples from throughout the country and examine them for genetic changes.
James Lu, president and cofounder of Helix, said the company is working with officials at the Florida Department of Health to help find cases caused by the variant, which is identifiable because the U.K. variant has a mutation that gives off a different signal when the sample tests positive, he said.
That gives lab techs and researchers a way of looking for the mutated virus without running full genetic sequences, a time-intensive and expensive process, on each sample.
“Across the board, the U.S. has not been doing sufficient amounts of genomic surveillance,” Lu said. “And only at this point are we scaling up the effort.”
Along with federal and state efforts, university researchers are forming alliances to pool resources and look for the mutated viruses. That’s happening locally with Jackson Health System, Miami-Dade’s public hospital, and the University of Miami. Elsewhere in the state, the University of Central Florida and University of Florida are also testing the virus for genetic changes.
Marco Salemi, a UF professor and molecular biologist, said he has collected thousands of samples from different parts of the state that he will spend the next month examining. The rise of the U.K. variant in Florida, Salemi said, has him increasingly worried about the how quickly the strain could overtake others as the main COVID virus in the Sunshine State.
“We definitely need more sequences to figure out what’s going on,” he said.
This story was originally published February 2, 2021 at 2:24 PM with the headline "The ‘UK variant’ of the COVID virus is making gains in Florida, now up to 5% of cases."
