FRIDAY, February 12, 2021 (HealthDay News) – A new variant of COVID-19 found in Southern California is common in the US and around the world, according to a new study.
The variant – called CAL.20C – was first found in Los Angeles County in July. It reappeared in Southern California in October and then spread in November and December with a regional surge in coronavirus cases.
The variant now makes up almost half of the COVID-19 cases in Southern California.
It’s not clear whether CAL.20C could be more deadly than current coronavirus variants or whether it could withstand current vaccines. New research is ongoing at Cedars-Sinai, Los Angeles to answer these questions.
“New variants do not always influence the behavior of a virus in the body,” said study co-author Dr. Eric Vail, Assistant Professor of Pathology at the Cedars Sinai Center for Bioinformatics and Functional Genomics.
The new variant has expanded to 19 states and the District of Columbia, as well as six other countries, according to a report published on February 11 in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
By January 22, the variant was found in Alaska, Arizona, California, Connecticut, Georgia, Hawaii, Maryland, Michigan, New Mexico, Nevada, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, Washington. Wisconsin, Wyoming, and Washington, DC It was also found in Australia, Denmark, Israel, New Zealand, Singapore, and the United Kingdom, according to the new study.
Study co-author Jasmine Plummer said that people traveling from southern California carry CAL.20C to other locations. Plummer is a research fellow at the Cedars Sinai Center for Bioinformatics and Functional Genomics in Los Angeles.
“CAL.20C is moving, and we believe the Californians are moving it,” Plummer said in the center’s press release.
According to Vail, the researchers are very interested in CAL.20C because it is the so-called spike protein, which enables the SARS-CoV-2 virus to enter normal cells and infect them.
More information
For more information on COVID-19, see the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
SOURCE: Cedars-Sinai, Los Angeles, press release, February 11, 2021
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