Department of Health: State Laboratory Guarding Against New COVID-19 StrainsThe Hawai‘i Department of Health (DOH) continues to proactively test COVID-19 specimens looking for new strains that may be significantly more contagious or differ in other ways from earlier strains.
Recent variants first discovered in the United Kingdom and South Africa are spreading more easily and quickly than other variants and have already spread to other countries.
The B1.1.7 variant has already reached the U.S. mainland and Canada.The Hawai‘i State Laboratories Division (SLD) began its molecular surveillance in June and to date has performed genome sequencing on nearly 700 samples of viral RNA.