Officials say that there are now five confirmed cases of the B117 coronavirus variant -- often called the UK strain -- in LA County.
LA County public health director Barbar Ferrer: "I would just note: there's no way that we don't have a fair amount of variant circulating, a fair amount of mutated virus circulating. It's just a question of how much and does it become dominant."
Barbara, not Barbar 🤦♀️
LA County public health director Barbara Ferrer: "We haven't yet seen the South Africa variant in any of the sequencing we've done, but that doesn't mean it's not here. Which is why we're just saying to everyone, 'Assume it's here.'"
Ferrer says it's unlikely that LA County's surge that began in November was caused by the UK variant. "What is possible is that there were mutations that were circulating that could in fact have been slightly more infectious," she says, mentioning the so-called California variant
A thing I've noticed: LA Mayor Eric Garcetti often blames the big fall surge here on more infectious coronavirus variants, while our health officials do not. This is what LA County public health director Barbara Ferrer said today:
Ferrer: "I don't want to sort of just go ahead and imply in any way that there was a more infectious variant and that was really the main driver. We could end up finding out that that contributed ..."
Ferrer: "...but the main drivers to our increases were in fact people were just not playing by the rules at the time. A lot of gatherings where people were not safe, they did not wear their face coverings and it's a virus that's easily transmitted, variant or not variant."
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