OREANDA-NEWS. Scientists have reported, that a new strain of coronavirus found in California is 11 times more deadly, than the «South African» variant of the virus. The strain «B.1.427 / B.1.429» was first identified in May 2020 and practically did not manifest itself until October. It turned out, that the California strain copies itself better and faster when it gets inside the human body and captures it's mechanisms. At the same time, the levels of antibodies produced in response to this variant of the virus were twice as low, writes the «Daily Mail».

According to scientists, infection with this strain of the coronavirus increases the viral load by about two times and is 11 times more likely to cause death. Experts admit, that this level of lethality may be the result of «statistical randomness» and will not be confirmed in a research on a wider population.

Currently, cases of this variant of COVID-19 have been detected in states such as Nevada, Washington, Alaska, Hawaii, Colorado, and Oregon, but the spike has been observed so far only in California.

Earlier in the United States, a hybrid strain of coronavirus was identified. It was formed by a merger of two other types of pathogen. For the first time, the «hybrid» was noticed by a doctor Bette Corber, who works at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the United States. She claims, that the new strain came from the fusion of two strains: British «B.1.1.7» and «B.1.429», which originated in the United States, so far, researchers have only known one case of infection with a hybrid form of coronavirus. Nevertheless, doctors fear, that a new type of coronavirus can lead to even more infections.