Researchers: New variant reported in New York

A new coronavirus variant is spreading rapidly in New York City and in the US Northeast, which could dampen the effectiveness of some current vaccine candidates, researchers said.

The new variant, called B. 1.526, carries mutations that help the virus dodge the body's natural immune response and the effects of monoclonal antibody treatment. It was identified by teams at the University of California (Caltech) and Columbia University.

Pfizer and BioNTech said on Thursday that they had begun a study to test whether a third dose of their authorized vaccine would fight new strains, such as the one first identified in South Africa.

Earlier studies found that both the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines offer less protection against the South African strain. Moderna said on Wednesday it made a new version of its vaccine targeting the South Africa strain.

The research group at Caltech scanned for mutations among hundreds of thousands of COVID-19 genetic sequences in GISAID, a database shared by scientists.

Appears in November

It discovered that the new variant first appeared in samples collected in New York City in November. By the middle of this month, the Caltech team found that the number of cases had risen to about 27 percent of viral sequences appearing in the database.

In the other study, researchers at Columbia University analyzed 1,142 samples from patients at the school's hospital and found more than 12 percent of people with coronavirus had been infected with the variant.

"Patients with this novel variant came from diverse neighborhoods in the metropolitan area, and they were on average older and more frequently hospitalized," the team said.

David Ho, one of the researchers on the Columbia team, noted cases in Westchester, the Bronx and Queens, the lower part of Manhattan and in Brooklyn.

There is some level of community spread involving the new variant."It seems to be widespread. It's not a single outbreak," he told The New York Times.

Michel Nussenzweig, an immunologist at New York's Rockefeller University, said people who have recovered from the coronavirus or who have been vaccinated are "very likely to be able to fight this variant off, there's no doubt about that".

California passed the 50,000-death mark from COVID-19 on Wednesday, the most of any state in the United States.