The variant now accounts for 10% of South Florida infections.

Health officials are on high alert as cases of a Covid-19 variant discovered in Colombia are rising in South Florida.

The B.1.621 variant is now trailing behind Delta, the most widely spread variant in the United States and the gamma variant.

In the US the variant has not been named a variant of interest or concern, as overall it accounts for just over two per cent of cases as of mid-July, said John Sellick, a professor at the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at the University at Buffalo.

“If this thing is really more transmissible and goes from 2 percent [of infections] to 30 percent or to 60 percent; we don’t want to see that,” Mr Sellick continued, “It has to be more fit than the delta variant.