New mutant coronavirus strain IS nearly 50% more contagious

Indeed, the new mutant variant of ‘super’ coronavirus is more contagious than previous variants, just as scientists feared, a new study finds.

Researchers at Imperial College London found that the new variant that has wreaked havoc in the UK and arrived in the UK is nearly 50 percent more transferable, based on samples taken from nearly 86,000 Britons.

That may not sound like much more, but each infected person currently leads to 1.15 more infections in the US, according to daily calculations from RT.live.

With an average of more than 186,000 newly infected people in one day in the US, that’s 48 percent higher a transmissibility of 1.85 could lead to more than 275,000 new infections per day.

It could spell disaster for hospitals in hotspots like California, where some health care systems and regions are already out of IC beds, in states of “internal disaster” and rationing.

In a study published yesterday that has not yet been peer-reviewed, but they found that the ‘R’ number for the new B117 variant is between 0.4 and 0.7 points higher than other variants.

And it seems to be spreading more often and more quickly among people in their 20s.

A virus ‘R’ number describes the average number of additional cases each infection leads to.

Due to this degree of portability, the R number in the US ranges from about 0.86 in Alaska to 1.23 in Maine, which has emerged as a hot spot this week.

In the UK, the R number is estimated to be between 1.1 and 1.3.

The new variant was first discovered there in September, but it exploded early last month, causing a wave of infections among Britons.

Researchers at Imperial College London sequenced the genomes of 1,904 people infected with the new variant and compared how quickly the virus spread to a wider sample of other specimens of more than 48,000 people in England.

As they expected, they found that the new virus did indeed have a “ selective advantage over circulating SARS-CoV-2 variants in England, ” they wrote in the print posted online Thursday.

The variant was also disproportionately common in people in their twenties and people living in South East and East England and London.

The new study’s findings mean that each person who contracts this mutated virus will pass it on to 0.7 more people, on average.

So far, there are no indications that the new variant causes a more serious disease or is more deadly.

Encouragingly, virologists and public health experts believe vaccines made by companies such as AstraZeneca, Pfizer and Moderna will still be effective against the new variant of the coronavirus.

But the new variant is heating up the race between the spread of the virus and vaccination campaigns in the UK, the US – where the new variant is now found in Colorado, California and Florida – and at least 31 other countries where the more contagious form of coronavirus is detected.

The US vaccination program has been a disaster so far.

Only 3.17 million Americans had been vaccinated on Friday, according to a Bloomberg News census.

The number of the CDC puts the number even lower. The agency’s site says its vaccination tracker will be updated every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, but at the time of publication, the tool showed Wednesday’s numbers, with 2.79 million people vaccinated.

Bloomberg’s higher estimate means that Operation Warp Speed ​​vaccinated only 16 percent of the 20 million Americans it promised to inoculate by the end of the year.

At this rate, it would take nearly a decade to vaccinate all adult members of the US population of 331 million people.

And many Americans remain on the fence about getting a vaccine, even if one is available. About 60 percent of nursing home workers in Ohio said they would refuse an injection.

Slow, dysfunctional vaccine distribution and Americans’ distrust of the shots combined could provide the B117 variant with just the opening it needs to spread like wildfire across the country, infecting millions beyond the 20 million people who have already had the infection in the US, and are killing thousands.