California scientists believe there is a strain of coronavirus grown in the state that could be responsible for the dramatic increase in cases, a report said on Sunday.
Two separate research groups discovered the apparent California strain while looking for the new variant believed to have come from the United Kingdom, according to the Los Angeles Times.
The alleged California variety is in the same “family tree” as the United Kingdom variety and may be behind the state’s spread in recent months, the newspaper said.
One of the labs that discovered the strain, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, said it reached 24% of the approximately 4,500 viral samples collected across California in the last weeks of 2020.
Another analysis found that 25 percent of the 332 samples collected in Northern California were of the new strain.
“There was a local variant under our noses,” said Dr. Charles Chiu, a specialist in laboratory medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, to the newspaper.
Chiu said they only found the strain when looking for the UK variant.
Dr. Eric Vail, a pathologist at Cedars Sinai, said the strain could be responsible for doubling the total death toll in the state in less than three months.
“It probably helped to speed up the number of cases during the holiday season,” said Vail.
“But human behavior is the predominant factor in the spread of a virus, and the fact that it happened when the weather cooled and in the middle of the holidays, when people get together, is not an accident.”