| This week, two separate teams of researchers found a new coronavirus variant in New York City and elsewhere in the Northeast that carries mutations helping it evade the body's natural immune response and the effects of antibody treatments.
Genomics researchers named the variant B.1.526. One of the mutations in this variant is the same concerning change found in the variant first seen in South Africa and known as B.1.351. It appears to evade, somewhat, the body’s response to vaccines, as well. And it’s becoming more common.
“We observed a steady increase in the detection rate from late December to mid-February, with an alarming rise to 12.7% in the past two weeks,” one team, at Columbia University Medical Center, wrote in a report that has yet to be published, although it is scheduled to appear in pre-print version this week.
It’s the latest of a growing number of viral variants that have arisen in the U.S., which has had more coronavirus cases — 28 million — than any other country and where spread is still intense.
Viruses mutate all the time. The more people who are infected, and the longer they are infected, the more chance the viruses have to change. A patient’s body will be loaded with billions of copies of a virus and may be slightly changed, or mutated. Most will come and go.
But sometimes a mutation or pattern of mutations takes hold and gets passed along. If viruses with such patterns become more common, they’re called variants. It's not unusual for variants to arise if they give the virus better transmissibility or the ability to evade treatments and vaccines. | 
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