A new “double mutant” variant of the coronavirus has been discovered in California – while scientists fear the strain may be more infectious.
The Stanford Clinical Virology Lab identified and confirmed a case of the variant – which first appeared in India – in the bay area, Stanford Health Care spokeswoman Lisa Kim told the San Francisco Chronicle on Sunday.
Seven other presumed cases are also being examined by Stanford.
The emerging strain is called a “double mutant” because it carries two mutations in the virus that help it get stuck in cells, the media reported.
The “double mutant” variant has been found in 20 percent of sequenced cases in the state of Maharashtra, where coronavirus cases have recently increased by more than 50 percent in the past week, Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious disease specialist at University of California, San Francisco, noted.
It is not yet known whether this new variant of COVID-19 is more infectious or resistant to the coronavirus vaccine, but Chin-Hong said it “makes sense” that it could be more transmissible.
“It also makes sense that it is more transmissible from a biological perspective, since the two mutations act in the domain of binding to the virus receptor, but there have been no official transmission studies so far,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle.
One of the variant mutations is similar to that found in the coronavirus variants first detected in Brazil and South Africa, and the other mutation is also found in a variant first detected in California, added Chin-Hong.
“This Indian variant contains two mutations in the same virus for the first time, previously seen in separate variants,” said the scientist.
“As 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 antibodies in the vaccine, it seems that there is a chance that the Indian variant will do it too ”, He explained.
Several other variants of COVID-19 have already been detected in the United States – including the highly contagious variant in the United Kingdom, known as B.1.1.7, the South African variant called B.1.351 and the Brazilian variant known as P.1.
The United Kingdom variant accounts for 12,505 cases in the United States, 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.