Massachusetts has emerged as the leader in an unfortunate statistic related to the coronavirus pandemic.
According to the Boston Globe, Massachusetts now contains the most cases in the country of the so-called Brazil variant, or P.1, with 54 cases that stem mostly from a cluster on Cape Cod.
Last week's public health report showed that nearly half of Barnstable County's 15 towns are "high risk" communities for transmission of the coronavirus. However, more Cape residents have been vaccinated than any other area of the state, according to the Globe.
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William Hanage, an associate professor of epidemiology at Harvard, told the Globe that the variants were detected when fewer people in the state had been vaccinated.
“To completely exclude this virus, we need to vaccinate a lot more people than we have already,” Hanage told the Globe.
