Martin County - Credit Wikipedia
#16,672
New Year's day is often very slow news-wise - with most government offices closed and much of the world in the process of dealing with the morning after the night before - but we have the following tweet (h/t Sharon Sanders from FluTrackers) overnight from the Florida Department of Health announcing the state's first UK variant COVID case.
While details remain scant, once again this is a younger patient, with no recent travel history, suggesting this variant is likely already circulating widely in the community.
Genomic testing for variants remains rare in the United States - performed in roughly 1 in 300 cases identified - and so we'd have to get very lucky to detect the variant before it had become well established in the country.
While the full impact of this variant (and others that are likely to arise in the months ahead) is unknowable, its reported greater transmissibility alone (see CDC: Emerging SARS-CoV-2 Variants) likely increases the level of difficulty in dealing with this pandemic.
Florida follows Colorado and California in announcing detection of this variant virus.
We should fully expect to see an avalanche of similar reports from around the country in the days and weeks ahead, as this variant has probably been circulating here for weeks, perhaps months.
