SC reports 4 cases of COVID-19 variant 1st found in India; Beaufort Co. outbreak improves
Dr. Linda Bell, the state’s top epidemiologist, is cautiously optimistic about South Carolina’s coronavirus outbreak, even with four cases of the B.1.617 lineage, a variant first discovered in India, now identified in the state.
Daily case counts have dropped by 97% since Jan. 8. And the state’s COVID-19 hospitalizations have decreased by 43% in the past month.
Beaufort County’s COVID-19 data mirror these statewide figures.
About six county residents are now testing positive for the coronavirus each day. In comparison, an average of about 100 new infections were recorded every 24 hours in mid-January.
Bell, though, on Wednesday warned people that millions of South Carolinians are still unvaccinated. Only about 35.1% of the state’s 12 and up population has completed inoculation, estimates show.
Roughly 50.1% of Beaufort County residents 12 or older, meanwhile, have received at least one dose, according to the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control.
COVID-19 surges, Bell said, are possible among those without a shot.
“We still have a lot of work to do,” she said. “We’re not to a point yet where we can completely relax (protective) measures. It’s so important for us to get so many more people vaccinated.”
What are experts predicting?
“The CDC actually categorizes South Carolina as a state that has a moderate, ongoing disease transmission. So we don’t know what the post-Memorial Day events might bring,” Bell told reporters Wednesday.
Vaccine trends
Beaufort County’s seven-day average of new first-dose vaccinations remains relatively low, but the county still ranks fifth in South Carolina for its inoculation rate of 3,987 vaccine recipients per 10,000 residents 12 or older.
The local demand for doses has plummeted, and health care providers are trying to address vaccine hesitancy and access concerns.
“This is a multi-strategy issue. It’s not going to be one of these big vaccine event things. It’s more door to door, block to block stuff,” said Dr. Ray Cox, executive director of Volunteers in Medicine on Hilton Head Island.
Case trends
Beaufort County has confirmed only 45 new coronavirus cases in the past week, DHEC data show.
The county’s two-week incidence rate as of Tuesday, meanwhile, was 57.8 cases per 100,000 people, which is a “moderate” rate under DHEC’s definition.
An incidence rate measures how quickly a disease is spreading through a given population.
Dr. Stephen Larson, medical director for Beaufort Memorial Hospital’s emergency center, said he or a colleague used to hospitalize a patient for COVID-19 every day.
Now, though, that’s happening less frequently, Larson said. All of the recent infections he’s seen are among unvaccinated people.
“It’s just drilled down to ‘vaccine or no vaccine,’” he said.
Latest COVID-19 research
The New England Journal of Medicine on May 12 published a letter from a team of scientists who found that Pfizer-BioNTech’s coronavirus vaccine is effective against the B.1.429 variant first reported in California and New York City’s B.1.526 variant.
The researchers also found that when the B.1.1.7 variant sometimes acquires the E484K coronavirus mutation, which “confers resistance to certain monoclonal antibodies,” Pfizer’s vaccine is still protective.
What else is going on?
Bell, the DHEC epidemiologist, on Wednesday announced that four cases of the B.1.617 variant lineage have been discovered in South Carolina.
The lineage was first identified in India last October, according to the World Health Organization. India has been devastated by a massive wave of COVID-19 cases this spring and scientists are working to verify whether B.1.617 has played a major role in the catastrophe.
B.1.617.1 and B.1.617.2, subtypes of B.1.617, could be more transmissible than other coronavirus variants, according to the WHO.
Two of the S.C. infections were recorded in the Midlands public health region, Bell said. The other two cases were reported in the Pee Dee region.
