Fri, February 12, 2021 (HealthDay News) – A new study finds that a new type of COVID-19 found in Southern California is spreading across the United States and around the world.
The variant – labeled CAL.20C – was first found in July in Los Angeles County. It re-emerged in Southern California in October, then spread in November and December, with a regional increase in Corona Virus cases.
The variant now accounts for nearly half of the COVID-19 cases in Southern California.
It is not clear if the CAL.20C is more lethal than the current variants of the Coronavirus, or whether it might withstand the current. Vaccines. New research is underway at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles to help answer these questions.
“New variants do not always affect the behavior of the virus in the body,” said study co-author Dr. Eric Vail, assistant professor of pathology at Cedars-Sinai Center for Bioinformatics and Functional Genomics.
The new format has spread to 19 states and the District of Columbia, as well as six other countries, according to the report, published Feb.11 in Journal of the American Medical Association.
As of January 22, the surrogate has been found in Alaska, Arizona, California, Connecticut, Georgia, Hawaii, Maryland, Michigan, New Mexico, Nevada, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, Washington, and has also been 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 places. Plummer is a research scientist at the Cedars-Sinai Center for Bioinformatics and Functional Genomics in Los Angeles.
“CAL.20C is on the move, and we think California residents are moving it,” Plummer said in a news release for the center.
Phil said that researchers are very interested in CAL.20C, because it includes a so-called spike protein, which enables SARSCoV-2 virus invades and infects healthy cells.
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Source: Cedars-Sinai, Los Angeles, press release, February 11, 2021