Photo courtesy of the Office of Governor Andrew Cuomo
Governor Andrew Cuomo confirmed on Tuesday, Dec. 22, that New York’s Wadsworth Laboratory has begun aggressive research of the new, more contagious strain of COVID-19 first detected in the U.K. in September. Wadsworth has looked at more than 3,700 virus sequences identified in New York already, and has yet to find the U.K. variant present in any of the random samples.
Wadsworth and the State health department have made agreements with six hospitals from across the State to obtain additional samples for further research and are making arrangements with other hospitals to do the same. “If the variant is already here, we want to know, and we want to be able to aggressively trace it,” the governor said, following reports on USA Today on Tuesday from the CDC that it is likely the new strain is already in the U.S.
As previously reported by Norwood News, New York officials had already been calling on the federal government to shut down flights from the UK, in line with measures taken by other countries, and following news that a new COVID-19 variant had been detected in the UK. Sky News has reported that the new strain of the virus has also since been detected in some other countries, including Denmark, Italy, Australia, the Netherlands and on the island of Gibraltar. However, the CDC stopped short of recommending a flight ban.
The governor said Virgin Atlantic has agreed to require pre-departure COVID tests before passengers leave the U.K. for New York. “This is the third major airline to require a COVID-19 test before allowing passengers to board planes traveling from the United Kingdom to New York,” he said. “I thank British Airways, Delta Airlines and Virgin Atlantic for this agreement.”
Meanwhile, the CDC said recent reports indicate that about six in ten cases reported in London are caused by the new variant, and initial studies suggest it may spread more easily from person to person. However, so far, scientists in the UK see no evidence that infections caused by this new variant result in more severe disease.
The CDC said it is still very early days in the identification of this variant, and therefore, a great deal is still to be learned. More studies are needed to understand how widely it has spread both within and outside of the UK, how it differs from other variants, and how the disease arising from this variant differs from the disease caused by other variants.
Among other factors, public health officials want to understand whether the new variant is detected using currently available viral tests, whether it responds to medicines currently being used to treat people for COVID-19, and whether it affects the effectiveness of existing COVID-19 vaccines.
Assistant Secretary for Health at the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, Admiral Brett Giroir, was interviewed on CNN on Dec. 21, and said, at this stage, there was no reason to believe that the new variant would evade the effectiveness of the current vaccines or that the new strain was more severe than the existing one. Experts in the U.K. do believe it may be more contagious however, given that it has been identified as the dominant strain there currently.
Giroir also said that it is likely that after hospital workers and residents in long-term care facilities, the next group of people to be vaccinated is likely to be those over 75, being the most likely group to end up in a hospital if they contract the virus, as well as essential workers.
In terms of the vaccine roll-out, Cuomo confirmed on Tuesday that, to date, 50,000 doses of the vaccine have been administered throughout New York. As reported by Norwood News, the state has already received 630,000 doses and expects to receive another 300,000 doses next week.
In terms of managing the current surge in cases, the governor reported that total hospitalizations across the state have risen to 6,661, and of the 164,868 tests reported on Dec. 21, 9,716 (5.89 percent) were positive. There were 1,126 patients in ICU on Dec. 21, up 31 from the previous day. Of this number, 614 are intubated. “Sadly, we lost 139 New Yorkers to the virus [on Dec. 21],” the governor said.
He added that it was important that New Yorkers continue the vaccination program through the holidays. “With Christmas and Kwanzaa (the harvest holiday celebrated by some African Americans from Dec. 26 to Jan. 1) rapidly approaching, I call on hospitals, nursing homes, and medical personnel to continue providing vaccinations throughout the holidays to ensure nursing home patients and frontline health care workers are protected as quickly as possible.”
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Welcome to the Norwood News, a bi-weekly community newspaper that primarily serves the northwest Bronx communities of Norwood, Bedford Park, Fordham and University Heights. Through our Breaking Bronx blog, we focus on news and information for those neighborhoods, but aim to cover as much Bronx-related news as possible. Founded in 1988 by Mosholu Preservation Corporation, a not-for-profit affiliate of Montefiore Medical Center, the Norwood News began as a monthly and grew to a bi-weekly in 1994. In September 2003 the paper expanded to cover University Heights and now covers all the neighborhoods of Community District 7. The Norwood News exists to foster communication among citizens and organizations and to be a tool for neighborhood development efforts. The Norwood News runs the Bronx Youth Journalism Heard, a journalism training program for Bronx high school students. As you navigate this website, please let us know if you discover any glitches or if you have any suggestions. We’d love to hear from you. You can send e-mails to norwoodnews@norwoodnews.org or call us anytime (718) 324-4998.
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