The mutant coronavirus strain first identified in the United Kingdom remains at low levels in the United States but is doubling its reach approximately every 10 days, according to a study published by researchers on Sunday.
The study bolstered modeling done by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which predicted last month that the more contagious variant could be the dominant strain in the U.S. by March.
The U.S. still has time to take steps to slow down the new virus strain, the researchers wrote, but they warned that without “decisive and immediate public health action” the variant “will likely have devastating consequences to COVID-19 mortality and morbidity in the U.S. in a few months.”
The research, funded in part by the CDC and the National Institutes of Health as well as the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, was posted to medRxiv, a preprint server, and has not yet been peer-reviewed.