More COVID-19 variant cases found in Georgia
News4Jax staff
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ATLANTA – The Georgia Department of Public Health confirms there are now 19 cases of the UK variant of COVID-19 identified in Georgia. So far, no other COVID-19 variants have been identified in Georgia.
The variant cases in Georgia are in eight men and 11 women between the ages of 15 to 61. The cases live in metro Atlanta – Carroll, Cherokee, Clayton, Cobb, DeKalb, Douglas, Fulton, Gwinnett and Paulding counties. State health officials are working to identify close contacts of the individuals and will monitor them closely.
The Georgia Public Health Laboratory and several commercial labs are working to identify the presence of this variant in hundreds of specimens collected at Georgia testing locations statewide, but that is only a small percentage of the overall number of COVID-19 tests performed. At the beginning of the year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was doing genome sequencing tests on 3,000 samples per week and was hoping to increase that to about 6,500 samples per week.