New COVID-19 variant emerging in California re-infected patient

CAL.20C is distinct from other new variants of virus

The new coronavirus variant emerging in Southern California has reinfected a patient who recovered from an infection with an earlier strain last summer.

The new emerging strain — dubbed CAL.20C — was found last month in the person who tested positive for a prior variant in July, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley said.

“It is really significant that the CAL.20C variant that seems to be taking over at least a third of the cases (in California) was able to reinfect someone,” Stacia Wyman, a scientist at the University of California, Berkeley’s Innovative Genomics Institute, said in a media release.

“That person’s viral load was very high,” Wyman said.

In one set of 95 viral genomes collected between Nov. 4 and Jan. 21, the institute’s researchers found 26% involved the new CAL.20C variant.

According to researchers at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, CAL.20C is distinct from the more contagious mutated strain first identified in Britain — known as

B.1.1.7 — that is now also spreading in the U.S.

In Southern California, the U.K. variant has been linked to “scattered coronavirus cases” in Los Angeles, San Diego and San Bernardino counties, Cedars researchers said Wednesday.

By contrast, the CAL.20C strain was identified in 36.4% of cases in a recent Cedars-Sinai study.

Much is still unknown about CAL.20C, but there’s concern it might also be more infectious.

CAL.20C is defined by multiple mutations in the S protein, a characteristic it shares with both the UK and South African strains, according to Cedars-Sinai research shared online for peer review.