South Carolina was already experiencing one of the country’s worst coronavirus outbreaks when authorities learned this week of an alarming development: a new variant of the virus, originally identified in South Africa, was detected in the state.
Shortly thereafter, a second case was discovered with no known connection to the first, state officials announced on Thursday.
None of the patients had a travel history, officials said, suggesting that what many public health experts feared happened: the new variant of the virus took root in the United States.
The arrival of the variant – considered highly contagious and less responsive to vaccines – highlights the unstable progress that the country has made in its battle against the virus. Even as millions of people have been vaccinated, and the country oscillates on a downward trajectory of about 150,000 new cases of coronavirus a day, new mutations of the virus are threatening to undermine the little progress the country has made.
“It’s a pivotal moment,” said Shane Crotty, a virologist at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology in California, who studies immunity against infectious diseases. “It is a race with the new variants to get a large number of people vaccinated before these variants are spread.”
The South Africa variant, known as B.1.351, is one of several mutations that emerged as the pandemic dragged on. Others include a variant from Brazil, which was detected in Minnesota this week, and one from Britain, which is spreading more widely in the United States.
Variants are believed to be more contagious, and South Africa’s is among the most worrying because preliminary research suggests that vaccines may be less effective against it.