Scientists in California believe there is a homemade coronavirus strain in the state that could be responsible for the dramatic increase in cases, a report said Sunday.
According to the Los Angeles Times, two separate research groups discovered the apparent tribe in California while searching for the new variant that presumably came from the United Kingdom.
The alleged California tribe is in the same “pedigree” as the British tribe and may be behind the spread of the state over the past few months, the newspaper said.
One of the labs that discovered the strain, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles said it accounts for 24 percent of approximately 4,500 viral samples collected in California in the final weeks of 2020.
Another analysis found that 25 percent of the 332 samples taken in Northern California were from the new strain.
“There was a homemade variant under our noses,” said dr. Charles Chiu, a specialist in laboratory medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, told the newspaper.
Chiu said they only found the tension when searching for the British variant.
Dr Eric Vail, a pathologist at Cedars Sinai, said the tribe 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 over the holidays,” 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 no accident.”