A new “double mutant” variant of coronavirus has been discovered in California, as scientists worry that the strain may be more infectious.
The Stanford Clinical Virology Laboratory identified and confirmed a case of the variant, which first emerged in India, in the bay area, Stanford Health Care spokeswoman Lisa Kim said on Sunday in the San Francisco Chronicle.
Stanford also examines seven other presumptive cases.
The emerging strain is called a “double mutant” because it carries two mutations in the virus that help it adhere to cells, the media reported.
The “double mutant” variant has been found in 20 percent of sequenced cases in the state of Maharashtra, a country affected by India, where coronavirus cases have recently risen more than 50 percent last week. , Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious disease expert at the University of California, San Francisco.
It is not yet known if this new COVID-19 variant is more infectious or resistant to the coronavirus vaccine, but Chin-Hong said it “makes sense” that it may be more transmissible.
“It also makes sense to be more transmissible from a biological perspective as the two mutations act in the domain of binding to the virus receptor, but so far there have been no official transmission studies,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle .
One of the variant mutations is similar to one found in coronavirus variants first detected in Brazil and South Africa, and the other mutation is also found in a variant first detected in California, he added. Chin-Hong.
“This Indian variant contains two mutations in the same virus for the first time, which were previously seen in separate variants,” the scientist said.
“Because we know that the affected domain is the part that the virus uses to enter the body and that the California variant is already potentially more resistant to some vaccine antibodies, it seems to reason that there is a possibility that the Indian variant does this as well.” explained.
Several other COVID-19 variants have already been detected in the United States, including the highly contagious British variant, known as B.1.1.7, the South African variant called B.1.351, and the Brazilian variant known as P.1. .
The UK variant represents 12,505 cases in the US, while the South African and Brazilian variants account for 323 and 224 cases in the country, respectively, according to the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.