Outbreaks of COVID Variants in Santa Clara County, Including Kaiser San Jose

SAN JOSE, California – The California Department of Public Health is seeing an increasing number of a new variant of Covid-19 statewide, including in the Bay Area. It is different from the strain detected in the UK. The new variant has been linked to several large outbreaks in Santa Clara County, including one in Kaiser in San Jose.

Health officials are keen to stress that they are studying the L452R variant in close collaboration with the CDC and the state health department because little is known. The main questions: how easily is it transmitted and will a vaccine be effective?

“Tonight we worked with UC San Francisco and Santa Clara to let you know that there is an L452R variant once again,” said Dr. Erica Pan, epidemiologist with the California Department of Public Health.

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National and local health authorities announced a new variant of COVID-19 on Sunday. It was first detected in Denmark last March and in Alameda County in November but was very rare.

Now, it is found at increasing rates in several counties in California, including San Francisco and Santa Clara.

“We have had a number of significant outbreaks and this variant has been identified in those outbreaks,” Santa Clara County public health officer Dr. Cody said Sunday.

Cody said one of those outbreaks occurred at Kaiser in San Jose, which sickened more than 70 staff, infected 15 patients and one person died.

Cody said the health department is still trying to determine the role of the variant in this outbreak.

“Whether these outbreaks behave because of the virus or some other disease, we don’t know,” Cody said. “This is a very important signal to us that we need to lean in and do a lot more investigation.”

Cody said so far there is no indication that the variant is associated with increased severity of the disease.

Dr. Charles Chiu of UCSF performs genomic sequencing primarily fingerprints for virus variances.

His latest findings are that the new variant went from almost 4% of cases to 25% in less than a month.

“This is why it is concerning that we have a variant that was actually quite rare before the start of December, since that represents about 25 percent of all the cases we are sequencing,” Chiu said.

It is not known how infectious this variant is and where it is in a critical region of the virus can affect its effectiveness for the vaccine.

“With all the mutations in this particular region, there is a concern if there will or will be an effect on the vaccine,” Chiu said.