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On Sunday (January 17), public health officials announced that the SARS-CoV-2 variant L452R has become increasingly common in multiple Californian counties and is responsible for several large COVID-19 outbreaks in the state.
L452R was first detected in Denmark in March 2020 and later identified in the US last year, but recent sequencing results from California show that the proportion of COVID-19 cases associated with this variant rose from 3.8 percent to 25 percent between mid-November and late December, The Mercury News reports. One of these outbreaks, according to The Washington Post, was linked to a hospital staff member in San Jose wearing an inflatable Christmas tree costume who might have infected at least 90 people with the L452 variant.
“It is common to identify variants of viruses like SARS-CoV-2,” says Erica Pan, an epidemiologist at the California Department of Public Health, in a statement. “It’s too ...
