Santa Clara County health officials shared some details late Wednesday about one of the first two cases of the South African coronavirus variant identified in California.
The case involves an adult in the county who had traveled internationally and became ill upon returning home. Observing county rules, the person then quarantined for 10 days.
The other California case of the variant occurred in Alameda County. Officials offered few details about the individual infected, saying they had just started their investigation.
The specimens were sequenced at the Stanford Clinical Virology Lab.
Dr. Catherine Blish, an infectious disease specialist at Stanford University, says how well the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines work against the variant, and against the variant that first emerged in the United Kingdom, is not fully known yet, but scientists believe both vaccines should offer substantial protection.
"It does appear that the variants are more resistant to the immune response generated by the vaccine(s)," Blish said. "But it’s quite likely that the immune response is so good in response to these vaccines that they will still be certainly fully protected from severe disease, (and) potentially also at least partially protected from mild disease in transmission."
In total, the state has less than 1,500 identified cases of different variants, Gov. Gavin Newsom said Thursday.
There is no standardized approach to look for coronavirus variants, Santa Clara County Health Officer Dr. Sarah Cody says.
"We don’t do the sequencing on every positive specimen," she said Thursday. "And so in some ways, we sort of have to assume that perhaps these variants of concern are already circulating. We just don’t know to what extent."