Via CBC News: B.C. quietly updates number of variants from U.K., South Africa as researcher raises concerns. Excerpt:
B.C. quietly updated the number of variant cases of coronavirus detected in the province on Friday, confirming six cases of the variant first reported in the U.K. and three cases of the variant from South Africa.
Variants identified in the United Kingdom, South Africa and Brazil are transmitting much more easily than the original strain, with data on the U.K. variant suggesting it is 50 per cent more transmissible from person to person than the common strain of SARS-CoV-2.
Provincial Health Officer Dr. Bonnie Henry acknowledged the presence of the variants in B.C. during Friday's news conference, which focused on the province's plan to rollout vaccines to the general population.
She said all cases of the variant from the U.K. are travel-related, but none of the variants first detected in South Africa have been linked to travel.
"Those are concerning. If we start to see rapid increase again, there's potential for these variants to [take hold], so this is just a way of saying we all have to be really careful right now," she said.
The updated numbers were not provided during Friday's press conference, but were listed in the B.C. Centre for Disease Control's written COVID-19 situation report on Friday. As of Thursday, there had been four instances in B.C. of the variant from the U.K. and one of the variant from South Africa.
B.C. laboratories are currently working on fast-tracking how they test for new, more infectious coronavirus mutations, and laboratories at the B.C. Centre for Disease Control are ramping up their capacity to identify cases of the new mutations.
But Andrew Longhurst, a doctoral student at Simon Fraser University and a health policy researcher, said that if some cases are not travel-related, it suggests variants could be spreading in the community unchecked — a situation he says should be addressed urgently.
