![]() ![]() The statistics suggesting that patients carrying B.1.427/B.1.429 variants were more likely to die was based on the charts of 69 patients who were admitted to the hospital in the first place because they had very severe Covid-19. “The devil is already here,” he told the Los Angeles Times, and he and his team suggested that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) should recognize B.1.427/B.1.429 as a “variant of concern” – as the variants first discovered in the UK and South Africa have been labelled.īut that study, too, comes with caveats. Researchers hinted that the variant could be better at evading the immune system.Ĭharles Chiu, the infectious diseases researcher and physician at UCSF who led the research, warned that the findings were a warning. Those patients were more likely to be admitted to the ICU and more likely to die. That team also looked at the medical charts of 324 patients hospitalized with Covid-19, and found that 69 of those patients were carrying the B.1.427/B.1.429 variant. It sequenced 2,172 samples from 44 California counties, and found that the B.1.427/B.1.429 variant accounted for 0% of cases back in September, and accounted for about 50% of cases by the end of January. ![]() The study’s findings are limited – just 630 samples were sequenced in January, and 191 in November, all collected from one neighborhood. “I would call that a very modest increase,” said Joe DeRisi, the co-president of the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, who has been investigating the variant’s spread in San Francisco, about the rates of transmission the study found.ĭeRisi’s team also found that the B.1.427/B.1.429 variant was not correlated with more severe infections, or a higher “viral load” – the amount of virus that builds up in the body. People living with someone infected with any other variant had a 26% chance of catching the virus. The researchers found that, after tracking 326 households, people in the same household as someone with the B.1.427/B.1.429 variant had a 35% chance of getting infected. By January, the variant accounted for 53% of cases sampled. The first one found that in late November, the B.1.427/B.1.429 variant accounted for 16% of the samples sequenced in San Francisco’s Mission district, a low-income, Latino community in a city where many residents are also essential workers. Researchers said that pre-prints of their work would be posted online in the coming days. Neither has been peer-reviewed or published in a scientific journal. There have been two studies this week, both from teams at UCSF. Another team in Los Angeles found that that variant was spreading there as well. While looking through samples from positive coronavirus tests to see if B.1.1.7 – the variant first detected in the UK – was circulating in the state, the USCF researchers realized that a different, homegrown variant actually accounted for a growing proportion of infections. But some labs, including at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), have recently redoubled efforts to figure out which variants are most common in the state. The US has been lagging behind other countries in doing this kind of monitoring – and still is. Scientists around the world have been tracking Covid-19 variants by scanning samples taken from people infected with the virus. Researchers are concerned that these changes could make it harder for the immune system to quickly recognize and block the virus. ![]() Other variants, including the ones first discovered in the UK, South Africa and Brazil, also have mutations on their spike proteins. The variant has three mutations that alter the shape of a protein, called spike, on the surface of the coronavirus.
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