President Biden seems to be taking the new variant of COVID seriously because he's limiting travel to countries where the strain is growing.
South Africa will be one of the 8 African nations that Biden will restrict travel to. According to CNN, Zimbabwe, Eswatini, and other countries are also on the list.
According to reports, the president is acting on advice from the CDC and Dr. Fauci.
There is a new variant of the vaccine that may make it less effective.
The new strain was found in South Africa but has also been found in other countries. Everyone knows that this virus knows no boundaries, so it's become a concern worldwide.
The variant makes the vaccine 40% less effective according to some scientists. The hope was that the Delta variant would fade after the first few months of the next year, but this new strain poses a real threat.
Britain, Israel, Germany and Italy have banned flights from South Africa, but the US is still allowing planes from that country to land. South Africa is still listed as a "Level 1 Low Level of COVID-19" by the U.S.
The new B11259 variant is 500% more competitively infectious than the previous one, which Dr. Eric Feigle-Ding sounded the alarm on. The number of bad spike mutations is more than that of Delta. Scary.
There's concern that this strain is more easily spread than we've seen before. It's not clear if the strain is more severe than the strains we've all been dealing with.
There is no evidence that the variant has made it to the US.
Originally published at 7 am.
