California finds first cases of coronavirus variant in South Africa

• California is the last state to report cases of the most transmissible variant of the coronavirus found in South Africa
• The variant, first identified in October, was found in at least four U.S. states.
• The variant appears to partially escape immunity acquired in response to vaccines or infection with the original virus.
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As soon as South African scientists detected a more infectious variant of the coronavirus in early October, scientists knew it was only a matter of time before the strain reached the United States.

In late January, the United States reported its first two cases of the new variant, called B.1.351, in South Carolina.

California became the last state to report its own B.1.351 cases on Wednesday. At a news conference, Governor Gavin Newsom said Stanford University had detected two cases in the San Francisco Bay area: one in Alameda County and one in Santa Clara County. He did not provide further details.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also identified six cases of B.1.351 in Maryland and one in Virginia.

The variant is not spreading as widely as B.1.1.7, another more infectious strain first identified in the UK in September. The CDC has reported more than 930 cases of B.1.1.7 in 34 states so far.

Coronavirus vaccines still appear to be highly effective against B.1.1.7, but scientists are more concerned with B.1.351 because preliminary research has found that it may partially escape the protection offered by current vaccines.

Moderna, for example, exposed blood samples from people who received the company’s vaccine to B.1.351. They found that these samples developed six times less virus-neutralizing antibodies than samples exposed to other variants. The company is now exploring the possibility of a custom-made booster shot to neutralize B.1.351.

Scientists also fear that people who have had COVID-19 could be reinfected with this more transmissible strain.

A race to prevent B.1.351 from spreading

The United States genetically sequences only 0.01% of coronavirus cases – about three in every 1,000 cases. This puts the country in 33rd place in the world in genetic sequencing, according to the latest data from GISAID, a global database that collects coronavirus genomes.

This shortfall in sequencing means that new variants can spread easily without being detected in the population. In all likelihood, B.1.351 entered the United States long before South Carolina reported its first cases. None of these people had traveled recently, nor was there any personal connection between them.

Even people who have received COVID-19 may be susceptible, the evidence suggests. A recent study of the Novavax candidate vaccine found that cases of B.1.351 were just as common among people who had already recovered from infections by other strains as those who did not.

“If you become dominant, the experience of our colleagues in South Africa indicates that even if you have been infected with the original virus, there is a very high rate of reinfection,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, he told CNN last week.

That possibility, combined with the increased transmissibility of B.1.351, could lead to another increase in coronavirus cases, warn the scientists. The variant does not appear to be more deadly than the original strain.

“When you have more contagious variants circulating and people now feel free to do things they haven’t been able to do for a while, we risk another increase happening in the near future,” Anne Rimoin, professor of epidemiology at Fielding at UCLA School of Public Health, he recently told Insider. “So we need to be watching carefully.”

For now, scientists hope that vaccinations and other public health measures will be sufficient to prevent B.1.351 from becoming the dominant strain in the United States. More genetic sequencing, they add, may prevent the spread of future variants.

“We have to find ways to stay ahead of it, instead of constantly chasing after it without good surveillance,” said Rimoin. Otherwise, he added, “we are destined to make the same mistakes”.