A few weeks ago, Indian government officials reported the detection of a specific variant of SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for COVID-19. According to researchers at Stanford University, the specific variant has now been found in the United States for the first time.
“We believe this is the first case described with this variant in the United States,” Lisa Kim, spokeswoman for Stanford Health Care, told NBC News.
The Indian variant has so far raised no particular concern, but scientists are of course watching it. The interest in this new version of SARS-CoV is because it has two mutations (E484Q and L452) that were previously seen separately in the other variants, but not together. There is currently not enough data to understand how this could affect the spread of the virus or how well it works against vaccines.
More than 136 million people have become infected with COVID-19 in the past 18 months, and more than 2,938,000 people have lost their lives to the disease.
[h/t: NBC News]