Two new Covid strains are believed to have originated in the US, one of which became dominant in Columbus, according to researchers.
The US Covid strains seem to make Covid-19 more transmissible but do not appear to be a threat to the effectiveness of the vaccines, researchers said.
The Ohio State University researchers have not yet released their study but said a non-peer-reviewed study will be published. Jason McDonald, a spokesman for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told CNBC that the agency is studying the new research.
One of the new Covid strains, detected in one patient in Ohio, shows a mutation identical to the now-dominant variant in the UK, according to the researchers. They explained that it “likely arose in a virus strain already present in the United States.” However, the “Columbus strain,” which the researchers claim has become dominant in the city, includes “three other gene mutations not previously seen together in SARS-CoV2.”
“This new Columbus strain has the same genetic backbone as earlier cases we’ve studied, but these three mutations represent a significant evolution,” Dr. Dan Jones, vice-chair of the division of molecular pathology at Ohio State and lead author of the study, said in a statement. “We know this shift didn’t come from the U.K. or South African branches of the virus.”
Meanwhile, researchers at Ohio State’s Wexner Medical Center have been sequencing the virus since March, but have since improved their efforts to sequence hundreds of samples per week, Jones said during a press briefing. He noted that he shows his group’s study to the Ohio Department of Health, but not the CDC yet.
“We are now in a period where the virus is changing quite substantially,” Jones said. “This is the moment, as we’re starting to see changes, where vaccination is being introduced and where the virus has been in the human population for some months, where we do want to be looking out very carefully for the emergence of not just single mutations, but new strains that have multiple mutations.”
Jones admitted that it is too early to know how much more infectious the strain in Columbus could be, but researchers think it is likely more contagious based on how fast it has spread over the past few weeks.
According to Dr. Bruce Vanderhoff, chief medical officer of the Ohio Department of Health, the department is “not surprised” that a new Covid strain was found in the state.
“The arrival of this new strain in Ohio is always concerning because more contagious strains could lead to more people getting sick, more people getting hospitalized, and ultimately more people dying,” he said. “No matter what strain of COVID-19, people can continue to protect themselves by wearing masks consistently, staying at least 6 feet apart, avoiding crowds, ventilating indoor spaces, and frequent hand washing.”
Peter Mohler, chief scientific officer at the Ohio State Wexner Medical Center and co-author of the forthcoming study, stressed that there is no data to determine that either of the new strains will affect the effectiveness of vaccines.
“It’s important that we don’t overreact to this new variant until we obtain additional data,” he said in a statement. “We need to understand the impact of mutations on the transmission of the virus, the prevalence of the strain in the population, and whether it has a more significant impact on human health.”
