LA CROSSE, Wis. (WXOW) – Healthcare professionals shared information about the Delta Variant and its discovery in La Crosse.
Dr. Paraic Kenny is the Director of the Kabara Cancer Research Institute at Gundersen Medical Foundation. Since the start of the pandemic in March of 2020, he has been working on sequencing COVID-19 genomes from positive tests. They have sequenced almost 2,000 so far but just recently they sequenced a positive test and found that it was the Delta Variant.
“This was one that we picked up as part of our random local sequencing as just general surveillance to find out what strains might be present in the community,” said Dr. Kenny.
He said the positive test did come from a patient that was fully vaccinated but the vaccines, especially the mRNA sequencing vaccines Pfizer and Moderna, do a really good job at protecting against the variants, including the Delta.
Jackie Cutts, Public Health Nursing Manager at the La Crosse County Health Department said the individual who contracted the Delta Variant has a history of travel. She said it’s a matter of time before we see the variant circling within the community because of its spread throughout the U.S.
“Just because we haven’t sequenced additional cases of it being here, doesn’t mean that it’s not here. The more people move around and travel, the more likely it is that we will see the Delta Variant and other variants in our region,” said Cutts.
She said that when someone is vaccinated, they are less likely to experience severe symptoms so that is the biggest thing people can do.
“They already have some level of immunity to it, their body has seen something similar to it so when the immune response is activated, it’s less severe usually,” said Cutts.
Dr. Kenny said if anyone was on the fence about getting vaccinated, now is the time.
“We’ve seen what it has done elsewhere in the world. It really rampaged through India, brought their healthcare system to its knees. When it came to the UK, where they have really good genetic surveillance of the virus, it pushed out the so called UK variant B117 and almost completely eliminated it from the United Kingdom. It has a lot more muscle than even the COVID-19 variants that we have been concerned about up to now,” said Dr. Kenny.
It is 50-60% more transmissible than the B117 and 60-70% more transmissible than the original COVID-19 strain explained Dr. Kenny. He said contract tracing in Australia found that it was transmissible just by walking past a table in a restaurant.
Right now in La Crosse, Dr. Kenny said two-thirds of the strains are the B117 variant but in other countries, they have seen that Delta can push that aside and take over a community so vaccinations are the only protection.
“What we are not sure about right now is how much risk we have as a community from this Delta Variant. I think the vaccines that we have given out in the community is going to provide some protection against the large scale spread that we have had,” said Dr. Kenny.
However, for large groups of unvaccinated people, like households, he said now the shot is more important than ever.
Meghan Buechel, Infection Preventionist at Gundersen Health System, said the Delta Variant is more transmissible which means it can wipe through a household far easier than the original COVID-19 that we were dealing with a year ago.
“We also are starting to do studies to recognize, is there a difference in severity of COVID-19 disease as a result of this variant,” said Buechel.
Right now, Jackie Cutts said while this variant has been detected, the level of spread within our community is much less than it has been previously but they will continue to monitor changes and adjust accordingly with guidelines.
She said for anyone feeling frustrated, the La Crosse County Health Department sympathizes with them, but this is the way a virus moves throughout a community.
“This is the normal way that a virus behaves no matter what virus it is. Any time a virus transfers from one person to another, there is an opportunity for that virus to mutate and variants happen with all sorts of diseases so that’s not new. It is why we update the influenza vaccine every year. It gets tweaked based on the strains that are dominant,” said Cutts.