The first United States case of the more contagious coronavirus variant that was initially discovered in Britain was found in Colorado on Tuesday, Gov. Jared Polis said, raising the worrisome possibility that the variant is already well established in the patient’s community — and perhaps elsewhere.

“It didn’t teleport across the Atlantic,” said William Hanage, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

The variant was detected in a man in his 20s with no travel history, Mr. Polis said. The man was in isolation in Elbert County, southeast of Denver, he said.

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Turkish officials announced Thursday that a vaccine from the Chinese company Sinovac has an efficacy rate of 91.25 percent, but the finding was based on preliminary results from a small clinical trial and none of the data was published in a journal or posted online.

The announcement came a day after another ambiguous news conference, also about Sinovac’s vaccine, in Brazil. Officials there were expected to provide detailed results from another trial, but only reported that the vaccine had an efficacy rate over 50 percent.

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A team of British scientists released a worrying study on Wednesday of the new coronavirus variant sweeping the United Kingdom. They warned that the variant is so contagious that new control measures, including closing down schools and universities, might be necessary. Even that may not be enough, they noted, saying, “It may be necessary to greatly accelerate vaccine rollout.”

Nicholas Davies, the lead author of the study, said that the model should also serve as a warning to other countries where the variant may have already spread.

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When Dr. Juan Aviles went to school in Puerto Rico, teachers taught him that the original people of the island, the Taino, vanished soon after Spain colonized it. Violence, disease and forced labor wiped them out, destroying their culture and language, the teachers said, and the colonizers repopulated the island with enslaved people, including Indigenous people from Central and South America and Africans.

But at home, Dr. Aviles heard another story. His grandmother would tell him that they were descended from Taino ancestors and that some of the words they used also descended from the Taino language.

Continue reading “Ancient DNA Shows Humans Settled Caribbean in 2 Distinct Waves” →