California scientists believe there is a strain of homemade coronavirus in the state that could be responsible for the dramatic increase in cases, a report said Sunday.
Two separate research groups discovered the apparent strain in California as they searched for the new variant believed to have come from the United Kingdom, according to the Los Angeles Times.
The alleged strain in California is in the same “family tree” as the strain in Britain and could be behind the state’s spread in recent months, the newspaper said.
One of the laboratories that discovered the strain, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, said it amounted to 24% of about 4,500 viral samples collected across California in the last weeks of 2020.
Another analysis found that 25 percent of the 332 samples taken in northern California came from the new strain.
“There was a house variant under our noses,” Dr. Charles Chiu, a laboratory medicine specialist at the University of California, San Francisco, told the newspaper.
Chiu said they found the strain only when they looked for the UK version.
Dr. Eric Vail, a pathologist at Cedars Sinai, said the strain could be responsible for doubling the state’s total death toll in less than three months.
“It probably helped speed up the number of cases during the holiday season,” Vail said.
“But human behavior is the predominant factor in the spread of a virus and the fact that it happened when the weather got colder and in the middle of the holidays when people gather is not an accident.”