A homemade coronavirus strain that appeared in California is more contagious and has a higher resistance to antibodies in COVID-19 vaccines, scientists have warned.
Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, said the new option has dangerous implications and should be considered a “concern” as well as the United Kingdom, South Africa and Brazil, the Los Angeles Times reported.
“The devil is already here,” said Dr. Charles Chiu, who led the study. “I would like it to be different. But science is science. ”
In the team’s unpublished findings, it suggests that the variant is about 19% to 24% more transmissible, the outlet reported.
Over just five months, the new strain has grown to account for more than 50 percent of all coronavirus samples used for genetic sequencing in the state, Chiu said.
The strain has also been shown to be more resistant to neutralizing antibodies – which raises serious questions about how much vaccines will be able to protect against it.
Compared to previous strains, the effectiveness of neutralizing antibodies against the variant was reduced to half of its usual levels, the study found, according to the LA Times.
Chiu said that the variant will probably represent 90% of the state’s cases by the end of the month.
Similar to strains in the United Kingdom and South Africa, the variant has a mutation in its spike protein – the part of the virus that makes it infectious, the newspaper reported.
The scientists recreated the mutation in a laboratory and found that it was able to infect human lung tissue by about 40% more easily, the outlet reported.