This is our daily update of breaking COVID-19 news for Thursday, December 31st, 2020. Previous daily updates , and .
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The highly transmissible variant of the coronavirus that was first identified in the United Kingdom has now been detected in two states. California Governor Gavin Newsom announced on Wednesday that this strain of the virus was detected in his state.
The variant was detected in San Diego, and health officials there let the state know. Newsom made the disclosure during an online conversation with Dr. Anthony Fauci, executive director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. “I don’t think Californians should feel this is something odd. This is something expected,” Fauci said. He had previously said he believed the variant to be here.
No other details about the California case were offered. Colorado said a second possible case with the UK variant may have been detected. The first confirmed case is a National Guard member who was deployed to a nursing home in Simla on December 23rd and was tested on December 24th. The second possible case is another National Guard member.
The National Guard went to the Good Samaritan Society care center after all of its 26 residents tested positive for COVID-19. Four patients died, and 20 of 34 staffers have also tested positive. The residents and staff are being tested for the variant.
Neither of the confirmed cases in Colorado and California have traveled outside of the United States.
The variant was detected in the UK in mid-September, and has been seen in about 70% of recent cases in London. The British government has now expanded lockdown measures to cover 44 million citizens—three-quarters of the country’s population—and Prime Minister Boris Johnson begged everyone to stay at home on New Year’s Eve, “We must face the reality that the sheer pace of the spread of this new variant requires us now to take even tougher action in some areas.”
On Wednesday, Governor Andrew Cuomo said that he believes the variant is in New York state. So far, it has not yet been seen in about 4,000 samples tested by the state, but, for some perspective, there were over 13,000 positive cases on December 29th and there have been more than 957,000 COVID total cases in the state since the beginning of the pandemic.
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