VANCOUVER -- The B.C. government has now confirmed 14 COVID-19 cases involving the P.1 variant of concern associated with Brazil.
The variant's presence in the province was first announced Tuesday.
P.1 is believed to be among the factors contributing to a surge of cases in Brazil’s second wave.
The province is set to reveal new modelling information on Thursday, but for now there’s still no idea whether the 14 cases are linked, or where they are located.
UBC zoology professor Sally Otto said it’s unclear if they may all be connected to a single household, or whether the variant may be spreading in the community.
“Which is, of course, a big concern,” she said.
Another concern for Otto: the recent jump in the number of active cases involving all variants. At the end of last week, there were 12. On Monday, that rose to 87, and on Tuesday, 113. On Wednesday, 109 active cases involving variants were reported by the province.
So far, the B.1.1.7 strain associated with the U.K. has been the most dominant in B.C., accounting for 580 of the 627 confirmed variant cases.
The current province-wide total also includes 51 new cases announced Wednesday.
“We’re running a race, and unfortunately B.1.1.7 is a really fast runner,” Otto said. “So before the vaccines kick in, our behaviour’s going to have to kick in and we’re going to have to help by again bending down this curve, and it’s a harder curve to bend down because it’s just a much more steeply rising curve.”
The first case involving P.1 in Canada was identified in Toronto in early February.
Dr. Peter Juni, professor of medicine and epidemiology at the University of Toronto, said around 35 to 40 per cent of COVID-19 cases in that province now involve variants, which are more transmissible. As in B.C., the B.1.1.7 variant is dominant in Ontario as well.
“It’s like a pandemic within a pandemic, and it’s unfortunately the perfect curveball,” he said, and added though vaccination will be a “game-changer," there are still months to go before more of the population is immunized. “Public health measures will be extremely important the next few weeks. Despite all of us being really tired, we can do it, we did it in the past, but we just need to take that really seriously now.”
In an email, the Ministry of Health told CTV News the province continues to watch variants of concern very closely and has increased testing around those strains.
“We have seen a rise of some of the more transmissible variants in our communities, particularly in the Lower Mainland and we continue to monitor those cases with contact tracing and increased testing,” the ministry said.
Thirty-three cases of the B.1.351 variant identified in South Africa have also been identified overall in B.C.