Is a COVID variant already in Kansas and Missouri? Here’s why health officials worry
Public health officials say it’s only a matter of time before the more contagious coronavirus variants show up in Kansas and Missouri — and they may be here already.
“I can nearly guarantee that this variant that has an increased transmissibility is here in our community,” Dr. David Wild, vice president of performance improvement at The University of Kansas Health System, said during a recent daily COVID briefing.
The variants spread faster and more easily, which could lead to surges in COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations, health officials across the country warn.
“This is a wake-up call to all of us,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, said Friday during the White House’s coronavirus briefing. He said the best recipe to prevent more mutations is to accelerate the pace of vaccinations.
There’s no current evidence that the new variants cause more severe illness or a higher risk of death, says the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Three variants originally detected in the United Kingdom, South Africa and Brazil have now shown up in more than 300 COVID-19 cases in at least 28 states so far, according to a CDC map updated Thursday, the latest numbers available.
The UK variant alone has caused 315 cases in the United States, the CDC says, including nine in a neighbor of Kansas, Colorado.
State health officials in Kansas and Missouri say they are monitoring and testing for the variants. Kansas health officials this week thought they had their first cases after a sudden outbreak at the Winfield Correctional Facility southeast of Wichita.
“We did epidemiological tracking and found out it came in from the community through the food services workers, and then it went from there to some other places. But it was very fast spread,” Dr. Lee Norman, the director of the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, said earlier this week during a KU COVID-19 briefing.
Kansas health officials said Thursday that testing turned up no evidence of any of the new variants, and they will continue to monitor the situation and work with the CDC.
Johnson County health officials warned the Board of Commissioners on Thursday that the variants are headed this way.
“We know from the states around us that that has definitely arrived and we’re starting to see an increase in cases in those places happening,” said health officer Dr. Joseph LeMaster.
“And we anticipate because there’s no real walls between here and Colorado or here and Oklahoma that we’ll see very similar sorts of numbers happening here, too.”
Because of that, Johnson County’s health officials told commissioners now is not the time to relax COVID-19 rules on gatherings, masks and restaurant and bar curfews.
“We really do not yet know the effect of the incoming variant,” LeMaster said. “We know that the UK variant is either here or will be here shortly, and the possibility of additional surges or increases in cases during the next couple of months is there.”
‘Extremely concerning’
As she and her colleagues debated those COVID-19 restrictions Thursday, Johnson County Commissioner Becky Fast called news about the new variants “extremely concerning.”
The UK variant tends to increase the amount of virus people carry in their nasal passages, allowing it to replicate “at a higher level when the person becomes infected,” LeMaster told commissioners. “This increases the transmissibility between different people.”
LeMaster said Kansas health officials are testing random samples for the variants. The Kansas health department is watching for outbreaks that act differently from others, Norman said.
The variant shows up as a positive COVID-19 test, but it takes special equipment to detect it, Kristi Zears, spokeswoman for the Kansas health department, said in an email.
“The KDHE lab does have the capability to look for this variant with our genetic sequencing equipment,” she said. “However, we do not fully sequence every positive sample that comes through.”
Zears said the health department is working with the CDC to test samples as part of a national effort.
“Additionally, if there is a cluster or we note something acting differently, we further investigate it. In the case of Winfield, things seemed a little fast-moving, which is what prompted us to do the genetic sequencing to see if this might be one of the CDC variants,” Zears said.
Missouri health officials did not respond to questions about their variant testing. But at a Dec. 30 press conference, Dr. Randall Williams, director of the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services, said state labs have the capacity to detect the new variants, “and we’re building that out.”
Public health officials in South Carolina said it’s almost certain that there are more cases caused by the variants than the two confirmed Thursday. The two adults who got sick lived in different parts of the state and did not appear to have any connection to each other. They hadn’t traveled recently, either.
“That’s frightening,” because it means there could be more undetected cases within the state, Dr. Krutika Kuppalli, an infectious diseases physician at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, told the Associated Press. “It’s probably more widespread.”
Highly contagious
Public health officials are trying to learn more about how the new variants spread, including whether they can be detected by the COVID-19 tests currently being used and how easily they spread, the CDC says.
“All viruses make mutations. The expectation is about one a month for an RNA virus,” like the coronavirus, Barry Bloom, professor of public health and former dean of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said during a recent Facebook forum about the vaccine rollout. “And if any mutation is beneficial (to the virus), it will have an advantage.”
“Clearly the British strain seems to be able to be more transmittable, whether it’s because it binds better to the host or has other properties that enable it to travel faster, we don’t know.
“But we do know that gives it a huge advantage, and a 50% increase in transmission means a big increase in cases, hospitalization and deaths, which makes this a very large threat.”
Wild of KU used this example: Say a community sees 1,000 new cases per month, and one infected person spreads it to one other person. If transmission increased 50%, “every one infected person is now infecting one and a half others on average, there are now 10,000 new cases instead of a thousand in a month,” he said. “That’s transmissibility. Not talking about outcomes now, just talking about how disease spreads. …
“That’s why we’re talking so much about this.”
The disease itself “in the case of these variants is not more deadly,” said Wild. “The same percentage is dying, but more people are transmitting the disease to others which leads to a very rapid increase in the number of infections and therefore a very rapid increase in the number of patients hospitalized and the number of patients that die.”
Will the vaccines work?
Scientists don’t know yet how effective the current COVID-19 vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna will be against the new variants.
Early data suggests they should be equally effective against the more contagious UK variant, but there is “great concern” about the South African variant, Marc Lipsitch, professor of epidemiology at Harvard’s school of public health, said during the school’s recent briefing.
That emphasizes “the real need to continue accelerating the (vaccine) rollout as much as possible because to some degree it’s a race between a more contagious virus and our ability to protect people,” Lipsitch said.
We’re “still going to see the vaccines able to cover them, it’s just, maybe not quite as good for that particular variant compared to some of the others. But the likelihood is that they will still be quite good,” Dr. Nathan Bahr, an infectious disease specialist at the KU Health System, said at a recent briefing.
That doesn’t mean the vaccines won’t work, said Wild.
“This is not an all or nothing, light switch on, light switch off thing,” said Wild. “It just might mean that instead of saying 94, 95% efficacy, that we say 80 or 85% efficacy, which is still very very important in the big picture.”
The imminent arrival of variants in the metro “doesn’t really change anything,” Wild said. “It stresses the importance of continuing what we’ve been doing for almost a year now.”
He and Bahr double-downed on the “pillars of infection control” that KU doctors have encouraged for months.
“Anytime we’re too close without a mask, that risk is now higher,” said Bahr. “The risk of us getting infected personally if we have a large group of people together, or us passing it to someone else becomes higher.
“So it is very important population-wise, but this is personal risk for everyone as well, for you and your loved ones. So keep on the mask, keep on the distance. … All those things remain extremely important.”
Includes reporting by The Star’s Sarah Ritter.
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