Just as California appeared to be about to turn the corner on Covid-19, the Stanford Clinical Virology Laboratory confirmed a case of an emerging variant that originated in India, Deadline found.
According to Lisa Kim, senior media relations manager at Stanford Health Care, “The Stanford Health Care Clinical Virology Laboratory identified and confirmed the newly described ‘India’ variant last week. This variant has the L452R mutation found in the CA variant, as well as another significant peak mutation, E484Q. This same position is mutated to a different amino acid (K) in the South African and Brazilian variants (P.1 and P.2). “
In more colloquial terms, this means that one of the mutations in the India variant is like a key change first discovered in the so-called Brazil and South Africa variants. The other mutation is also found in a variant first detected in the California, which is by far the most widespread new strain in the state.
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The news was first reported by the San Francisco Chronicle.
Development is worrying because, for the first time, it combines worrying mutations from separate variants, the so-called worrying variants.
“This Indian variant contains two mutations in the same virus for the first time, previously seen in separate variants,” Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious disease specialist at UCSF, told the Chronicle on Monday. “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 . “
Stanford’s Kim warns that “it remains to be seen whether this variant is more infectious or resistant to the vaccine’s antibodies.” In fact, despite the increase in cases in recent weeks in India, in late March the authorities were more concerned with the spread of the United Kingdom variant than the double mutant, according to the AP.
But news of an unusual new strain adds an extra dimension to growing concerns about California variants, especially since one of the mutations is also found in one of the most common strains in the state.
Since April 1, California has been tracking five variants of concern, including the United Kingdom (B.1.1.7), Brazil (P.1 and P.2), South Africa (B.1.351) and, of course, its cultivated country Variants of the west coast (B.1.427 and B.1.429). See the chart below.
Kim said there was “a confirmed case” of the double mutant “by [genomic] Stanford sequencing, 7 presumptive by RT-PCR screening. ”These numbers may not seem like much, but consider this context: in California, only a small number of test samples are marked for genomic analysis.
For example, California administered more than 55 million Covid-19 tests. Of these, less than 50,000 have been flagged by doctors for genomic sequencing. This means that less than 0.01% of the samples have been tested. Granted, those that were tested were flagged by experts, but in a region of 40 million that is also the union’s most diverse state, such surveillance does not provide a reliable view of how far these variants have spread.