A new form of the coronavirus is spreading across California. The new variant, which scientists call by its genetic designation B.1.427/B.1.429, could be more transmissible than older forms of SARS-CoV-2.
But don’t panic. Even as B.1.427/B.1.429 marches across California, new COVID infections are in free fall in the state. It seems expanding vaccination efforts and continuing social distancing are a safe bet to maintain the overall improvement in public health even in the face of a potentially more spreadable virus.
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It’s not an isolated phenomenon. COVID cases and deaths are dropping in many countries with well-organized vaccination campaigns and strong social-distancing rules. The appearance of more transmissible variants similar to B.1.427/B.1.429 hasn’t halted the recoveries, even in countries where new variants are dominant.
That’s good news. There’s still a lot we don’t know about the new coronavirus variants. But the circumstantial evidence indicates humanity is winning its war with SARS-CoV-2—and the virus’ creative counterattacks are failing.
“The variants are a significant worry but we shouldn't be alarmist,” Lawrence Gostin, a Georgetown University global health expert, told The Daily Beast. “The same risk mitigation measures that have worked all along will continue to work.”
The B.1.427/B.1.429 variant first appeared in December. It has since spread to 45 other states as well as Australia, Denmark, Mexico, and Taiwan, but it’s most prevalent in California.
By January the new variant was the most common form of the coronavirus in the Golden State, according to an as-yet-unpublished study led by Charles Chiu, the University of California, San Francisco virologist who first identified B.1.427/B.1.429. The New York Times first reported the study’s findings.
B.1.427/B.1.429 is similar to several other major variants, all of which appeared in separate countries over a span of several weeks last fall and winter. There’s B.1.1.7, which first appeared in the United Kingdom, plus the South African B.1.351 and the P.1 variant from Brazil.
All three of these variants feature a mutation scientists call N501Y, which affects the spike protein that’s a signature of SARS-CoV-2. The mutation makes the protein “grabbier” and could increase its chances of causing an infection. The California variant doesn’t include N501Y, but it does feature a mutation called L452R that might have similar transmissibility-boosting effects.
There are some early indications that the variants might be somewhat more resistant to the leading coronavirus vaccines. The vaccines still work, experts have stressed—they might just work slightly less well.
U.S. epidemiologists have monitored the new variants as closely as America’s inadequate genetic-surveillance system allows, warning that their spread could render ineffective communities’ social-distancing rules and partially erase the slowly emerging population-wide benefit of more and more people getting vaccinated.
The variants’ seemingly relentless march prompted Rochelle Walensky, the new director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to urge special caution.
“Now more than ever, with continued spread of variants that stand to threaten the progress we are making, we must recommit to doing our part to protect one another,” Walensky said in late January. “Wear a well-fitting mask, social-distance, avoid travel and crowds, practice good hand-hygiene and get vaccinated when the vaccine is available to you.”
Americans seem to have heeded the expert advice since then. “It’s likely that the population is more fearful and adhering to public-health advice more, like masking and distancing,” Gostin said.
This extra caution only bolsters the benefits of vaccination and the immunity that lingers after people recover from COVID. So far, states have administered 65 million doses of two different two-dose vaccines. Meanwhile, no fewer than 27 million Americans have caught and recovered from COVID, giving them some degree of immunity for at least a few months, in most cases.
“We are seeing chains of transmission being broken,” Gostin said. As a result, the worst-case scenarios initially imagined in light of the new mutations haven’t come true. In most of the countries and states that have given rise to new, theoretically more-transmissible variants, cases are falling—fast.
The United Kingdom was being battered by nearly 60,000 new cases a day in mid-January. This week new cases are down to 11,000 a day. Over the same span of time, South Africa went from 19,000 new infections a day to just 1,700.
California’s improvement is similar. The state’s new cases declined from 44,000 a day in mid-January to just 6,600 today.
It’s always possible that another wave of infections is coming. But for now, it looks like we’ve got a handle on the baseline SARS-CoV-2 and its nastier variants. “We have seen a tremendous drop in infection—in fact, a collapse of the epidemic,” Jeffrey Klausner, a former professor of medicine and public health at UCLA who previously worked at the CDC, told The Daily Beast.
At least one expert is unsurprised. Edwin Michael, an epidemiologist at the Center for Global Health Infectious Disease Research at the University of South Florida, runs computer simulations in order to understand the likely course of the pandemic. As recently as late late year, his simulations had the virus mostly running its course in the United States by late summer.
Michael recently began folding the new U.K. variant into his computer models. It barely made a dent.
If the new variant turns out to be 50 percent more transmissible, it could prolong the pandemic in the U.S. a few weeks into late September. If the variant is 75 percent more transmissible, it might extend the pandemic two more months into November.
But there’s a catch, Michael told The Daily Beast. “A 50-percent release of social constraining measures will result in a major resurgence,” he said. “So the take-home message [is], it is the social measures that are containing the spread of the new variants.”
If we can keep wearing our masks and avoiding crowds for a few more months, every indication is we can beat COVID and its variants—and get on with our lives.
Well, mostly. If the appearance of new SARS-CoV-2 mutations in recent months has taught us anything, it’s that the virus is clever. It’s always looking for new ways to ensure its own survival. It’s always improving.
The pathogen could come back in new and more dangerous forms. To prevent some future flare-up from becoming a second pandemic, we need surveillance. Lots of it. “We have to be much better about continually sequencing all samples so that we can keep track of variants,” Aimee Bernard, a University of Colorado immunologist, told The Daily Beast.
But widespread surveillance is a massive undertaking—and one the United States has never taken very seriously. “We don’t have an accurate picture and need far more comprehensive sequencing efforts,” Rob Knight, the head of a genetic-computation lab at the University of California, San Diego, told The Daily Beast.
States must do more testing. The CDC must collect more of these test samples, analyze them in a systematic way and disseminate the resulting data to local authorities. Better surveillance could alert us to the next mutation before it gains ground—and help us beat that variant the same way we’re beating the current ones.
