Two coronavirus strains first detected in California have become “variants of concern” in the threat classification system used by U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The two variants — identified by scientists as B.1.427 and B.1.429 — appear to be 20 percent more transmissible than the original virus, and some COVID-19 treatments may be less effective against them. The good news, however, is that the CDC does not believe that approved vaccines are significantly less effective against both variants and that no variant of coronavirus is at the highest level of CDC threat as a “high-consequence variant ”. Three other variants — one first detected in the United Kingdom, another in South Africa, and another in Japan and Brazil — are also on the CDC’s list of troubling variants. There are also three other “variants of interest.”
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