Santa Clara County health officials Thursday warned of an alarming rise of coronavirus infections driven by variants believed to spread more easily and be more resistant to vaccines that threaten to reverse recent progress in corralling the potentially deadly pathogen.
With businesses opening up after declines in cases over the last two months, Santa Clara County Health Officer Dr. Sara Cody urged residents to avoid travel, continue to wear face masks and avoid crowds and indoor activities with others, fearing cases could swell again before enough people are vaccinated.
“We’re back in a bit of a precarious place as far as our ability to curb this pandemic,” Cody said. “We all have cabin fever, we all want to get out, we all want to get back to our lives, but we can’t do that quite yet.”
County officials said all four of the most concerning variants have been circulating in the county. As of March 27, there were 92 confirmed cases of the United Kingdom variant in the Bay Area’s most populous county, up from 15 in mid-March. There were three confirmed cases of the South Africa variant, up from two in mid-March. There was one case of the Brazil variant and over 1,000 confirmed cases of the pair known as the California or West Coast variant.
In addition, the county Thursday reported its first two cases of the two New York variants, considered less threatening “variants of interest.”
The announcement came the same day California opened eligibility for the COVID-19 vaccine to all adults 50 and older, even as most areas including Santa Clara County continue to be plagued by shortages and many of those who already were eligible have been unable to schedule a shot.
Cody said “we are in a race between the variants and the vaccine,” as health officials struggle to get the shots to as many people as quickly as possible to avert another surge.
Case data in Santa Clara and other counties don’t necessarily indicate a reversal of the downward trend that began in January, but Cody said there are signs that infection rates are leveling off, much like they did in late October just before the horrific winter surge.
“We are now seeing our case rates flatten, and in some cases there’s some indication that they are beginning to tick up,” Cody said. “We may have gotten as low as we are going to go.”
Several variants of the virus that causes COVID-19 have been worrisome as they have shown to spread more easily among people and to be more resistant to current vaccines.
California’s more infectious West Coast variant is now the dominant variant in the state and has been proven to thwart protective antibodies used in vaccines and therapeutics, according to a University of California-San Francisco study.
The Centers for Disease Control has labeled it a “variant of concern,” along with others first identified in the U.K., South Africa and Brazil.
Gov. Gavin Newsom, after receiving the one-shot Johnson and Johnson vaccine Thursday morning in Los Angeles, said that “we need to be cautious” about the new variants and their potential to ignite a new case surge. Several states including Michigan, New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania have seen rising infections.
“We’re very mindful, we’re very concerned about these mutations,” Newsom said Thursday. He noted that while California has been opening up as case rates decline, his reopening blueprint allows for that to be reversed with more business and activity restrictions if needed.
“If we see numbers increase, the blueprint allows us to toggle back,” Newsom said.
Variants occur as the virus reproduces in infected people, with occasional changes that in some cases can make it more infectious or resistant to the body’s defenses.
No coronavirus variants currently rise to the highest “variant of high consequence” threat level for strains shown to significantly reduce vaccine effectiveness.
The West Coast variant — it’s actually a pair, known as B.1.427 and B.1.429 — has been found to be about 20 percent more infectious than the original virus, according to the UCSF study. The variants from the U.K. and South Africa are thought to be as much as 50% more transmissible.
The U.K. variant, known as B.1.1.7, has been found in all 50 states and the District of Columbia and is on track to become the nation’s dominant variant.
The South African strain, known as B.1.351, which appears to be more contagious and more resistant to some vaccines, originally appeared in Santa Clara County in February and was linked to travel. A second case surfaced in mid-March, the fourth in the state, and was believed to have resulted from transmission within the community.
The South African variant is able to elude the AstraZenca vaccine, which is not yet authorized in the U.S., according to a clinical trial published last month in the New England Journal of Medicine. Two other vaccines now in use made by Moderna and Johnson & Johnson offer some protection. But the South African variant has not gained much of a foothold in the United States.
According to the California Department of Public Health’s latest count, there are now a total of 8,800 cases statewide of the two variants together known as the West Coast strain, 474 of the U.K. strain, six of the Brazilian strain, known as P.1, and four of the South Africa strain.