Variant Mu appears in Pima County

PIMA COUNTY – The state of Arizona is overwhelmed by the onslaught of Covid-19 and the Delta variant, which has exhausted its medical staff and, at times, with few spaces in hospitals; in addition to that, health officials indicate that they have evidence that the Mu variant appeared in Pima County.

The data reveal that this variant was discovered approximately two weeks ago, however, more studies are currently being carried out to corroborate the information.

Pima County Health Director Dr. Theresa Cullen reported that signs of a new mutation were reported on September 2, so a five-day period was saved for further testing.

He commented that it is likely that this new variant will spread silently, just as the Delta did, so they continue to analyze cases.

For Josshua Labaer, director of the Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University, “it is mathematically inevitable that more variants will emerge if there is a high spread of the virus; some arise and disappear, but others persist”.

For Dr. Cullen, until now it is difficult to know or predict what the behavior of this new strain will be like, since there is very little knowledge about it, it is known that it was discovered for the first time in Colombia and it is more resistant to vaccines than the Delta variant.

Currently, national health authorities consider this new finding of Coronavirus as a “variant of interest” and, so far, cases like this have been found in 49 states of the country.

In addition to this, Arizona doctors indicate that they should be vigilant about how the panorama of infected will behave after the vacation period for Labor Day.

While a number of Arizona residents have their immunization schedules complete, they expect the number of patients seen to increase due to the holiday weekend and the Delta variant.

In recent days, health authorities asked the community to stay at home during these celebrations in order to prevent more Covid-19 infections from being registered among the population.

It has even been announced through the Banner Hospital that there are cases of children infected with this virus, since 412 underage patients were received during August and 174 were treated in July, who had symptoms or were positive for said virus.