The United States may now have its own locally evolved, fast-spreading strain of the virus that causes COVID-19, according to White House pandemic trackers.
If that’s true, public health officials need to ramp up testing and socially distancing efforts now to keep the new super-strain from making the pandemic worse, the pandemic trackers say.
The pandemic trackers are members of a working group at the White House Coronavirus Task Force.
The working group members talked about the possible rise of a new, aggressive, U.S.-evolved strain of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) — the virus that causes COVID-19 — in the recommendations section in their latest weekly state-level report set.
The working group is the same body that has started posting detailed state-level and community-level data in the federal government’s Community Profile Report spreadsheet collection.
The federal government is sending the state-level reports to state officials and is not making those reports available directly to members of the public. The state-level reports provide much less detailed data than the Community Profile Report spreadsheets, but they give top-level summary data, and they also give the working group’s narrative assessment of the current pandemic situation.