The first case of the P.1 COVID-19 variant originally detected in Brazil has been confirmed in Massachusetts, the state Department of Public Health announced Tuesday.
The P.1 variant — first found in the city of Manaus, in Brazil — is one of several strains of the virus that public health officials are concerned about because of their potential for increased contagiousness. The others are the B.1.1.7 variant, originally found in the United Kingdom, and B.1.351, which originated in South Africa.
Dr. William Hanage, an associate professor of epidemiology at Harvard's T.H. Chan School of Public Health, says less is known about the P.1 variant than the other two but that data suggest "it is either more able to re-infect people, more transmissible, or some combination of those."
“No combination like that is good," he added. "We still need to be getting more people vaccinated as quickly as possible in order to prevent it getting a toehold, because if it does, then it means that more people will have become infected than would have been the case.”
The person infected with the Brazil strain in Massachusetts is a woman in her thirties in Barnstable County. The DPH said she tested positive in late February and that there is no information available on how sick she is, or whether she had traveled recently. The department said they were notified of the woman’s results through the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s national surveillance system.
There are currently 213 confirmed cases in Massachusetts involving the U.K. variant of the coronavirus, and 6 cases involving the South Africa variant.
Epidemiologists have said that those numbers are likely a small fraction of actual cases in the state involving more contagious virus variants.
There’s currently a lag of anywhere from 10 to 14 days between someone testing positive, and full confirmation that a novel strain of the coronavirus is involved, according to Dr. David Hamer, a professor of Global Health and Medicine at Boston University.
"We need a nationwide surveillance system that's coordinated ideally by the CDC, that can track the evolution of SARS-CoV-2 in different parts of the country, and use those data to then tell public health authorities and vaccine producers which strains are most dominant and that we need to be targeting with the vaccines,” he said.
Dr. Shira Doron, an infectious disease physician and the hospital epidemiologist at Tufts Medical Center in Boston, said there is concern that a variant like P.1 could destroy recent progress made as more and more people are vaccinated.
“We really have to vaccinate as quickly as possible," Doron said. "More virus means more mutations. So we have to keep the numbers down with every single strategy that we have: masking, distancing, avoiding crowds, staying home when sick, getting vaccinated as soon as it is your turn. And if we can keep that up a little bit longer, we can control even more contagious variants.”
Hanage said the three currently available vaccines — from Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson — “are expected to be pretty good at preventing severe disease caused by [the P.1] variant.”
The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines "produced extremely good immunity," said Hanage. The Johnson & Johnson vaccine performed well in South Africa against the B.1.351, he added.
"So I'm pretty confident about the vaccines,” Hanage said.
