New Coronavirus Variant Springs Up, Tracked In NYC

NEW YORK CITY — A new, potentially homegrown coronavirus variant spreading through New York City isn’t yet a cause for major concern, the city’s top doctors said.

Talk of B.1.526 — a variant recently reported by two teams of doctors — was featured prominently in Mayor Bill de Blasio’s daily briefing Thursday.

The variant was first detected in coronavirus databases in November and, by one measure, now accounts for 1 in 4 cases in the city, the New York Times first reported.

But de Blasio and his top doctors took pains to assuage New Yorkers’ fears and emphasize that the science is still out on whether the variant is cause for concern.

“Until there’s evidence that tells us that a variant is not handled well by vaccine, for example, or a variant has different impacts, we shouldn’t assume the worst,” de Blasio said. “We should say we need the full truth.”

A New York Times story outlined the results of two studies on the variant published this week by teams at Caltech and Columbia University.

Caltech researchers found the variant accounts for about 25 percent of coronavirus samples from New York during February. The Columbia team conducted a different type of analysis that found a specific, potentially concerning mutation recently spiked 12 percent and tied it to the new variant.

“We see cases in Westchester, in the Bronx and Queens, the lower part of Manhattan and in Brooklyn,” David Ho, director of the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center at Columbia University, told the New York Times. “So it seems to be widespread. It’s not a single outbreak.”

The two studies aren’t peer reviewed; and Jay Varma, the city’s senior health adviser, stressed that more research needs to be done.

Varma said not all coronavirus variants — or strains of any virus, for that matter — are cause for concern.

“We need to just consider this a variant of interest — something that’s interesting that we need to follow and track,” he said. “It doesn’t change anything about our public health concern. We need more data and studies to understand that.”

Likewise, city health Commissioner Dave Chokshi noted the new variant simply hasn’t been studied as much as the so-called “U.K. variant.” The strain’s effects simply aren’t known yet, he said.

“That’s the most important thing from the public health perspective, whether it’s a new strain that spreads more easily or causes more severe illness or reduces vaccine effectiveness, we have no indication that that’s the case yet,” he said.