SoCal Coronavirus Variant 'Rapidly' Spreading Around The World

LOS ANGELES, CA — As the world continues to navigate a delicate balance between coronavirus vaccinations and variants, one particular strain homegrown in Southern California appears to have made its way around the world in a short time — and holiday travel may be to blame, according to researchers from Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.

To date, the Southland variation of coronavirus — CAL.20C — has been found in 19 different U.S. states plus Washington D.C. and six other countries since it was first discovered in October of last year, according to Cedars-Sinai investigators.

"CAL.20C is moving, and we think it is Californians who are moving it," Jasmine Plummer, Ph.D., said. Plummer co-authored the study and is a research scientist at the Cedars-Sinai Center for Bioinformatics and Functional Genomics.

Those traveling from the Southland may have spurred the new mutant's rapid rate of spread, according to new research published Friday in the peer-reviewed Journal of the American Medical Association.

The Southland variant was first discovered last summer in a single Angeleno case, Cedars-Sinai reported. It resurfaced in cases again in Southern California in October but it didn't begin really spreading until November and December as the state grappled with a holiday-fueled surge of cases.

The Los Angeles International Airport appears to have been a key gateway for variant carrying travelers, as it is one of the busiest airports in the U.S.

"While air traffic across the U.S. has plummeted in the last year during the pandemic, about 2 million domestic and international passengers still traveled through LAX each month in November and December 2020," according to Cedars-Sinai.

While this news is sure to raise hairs, it remains unclear whether any of the West Coast variants are more deadly, more infectious or more resistant to vaccines than other variants, Dr. John Swartzberg of U.C. Berkeley told Patch last week. Swartzberg is a professor of infectious disease and vaccinology.

"Those two [West Coast] variants, we don't have as much information about and we really need that," Swartzberg said. "There's no evidence that suggests that they would be resistant to our current vaccines...but we don't have a lot of solid data yet even about that."

CAL.20C is comprised of five recurring mutations, including the L452R variant that has been identified by the state's health department. It is different from the United Kingdom's B.1.1.7 variant and the South African variant, B.1.251 — both of which are highly transmissible.

The South African variant is also believed to lessen the effects of some vaccines, according to multiple reports.

As of Sunday, there were 186 cases of B.1.1.7 and just two South African variant cases detected in California.

"New variants do not always affect the behavior of a virus in the body," said the study's other co-author, Dr. Eric Vail, an assistant professor of Pathology and Director of Molecular Pathology in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at Cedars-Sinai.

Researchers at Cedars-Sinai said they are working to confirm the effects of the Southern California variant as Southern California remains one of the country's hot spots in terms of case density.