A new report from state Department of Health’s State Laboratories Division shows that the number COVID-19 cases caused by “variants of concern” now make up a greater percentage of cases in the state, and that percentage continues to grow, the DOH said today.
“Variants of concern now make up more than 90% of the genomes sequenced by our lab,” State Laboratories Division Director Dr. Edward Desmond said in a news release. “We detected our first variants in January and in just four months they have replaced the original COVID-19 lineages as the COVID we find most often.”
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a variant of concern is a strain of the virus for which there is evidence of increased transmissibility, more severe disease or reduced effectiveness of antibodies.
The state laboratory has detected 1,023 specimens with variants of concern since the first was detected in Hawaii on Jan. 21, the DOH said.
According to the DOH, the B.1.429 variant, first found in California, was the dominant strain in March and early April.
It has been detected 631 times.
However, the B.1.1.7 variant, first found in the United Kingdom, replaced the B.1.429 variant as the most dominant COVID strain in the state in late April.
The U.K. variant now accounts for at least 61% of variants circulating in the islands and has been detected 304 times.
Both variants are more transmissible strains of the virus.
The P.1 variant, first detected in Brazil, has been found in 36 specimens in Hawaii, including 22 on Maui and 13 on Oahu, the DOH said.