SALT LAKE CITY — The Scripps research institute has been working with the National Institutes of Health to track COVID-19 variants on a site called outbreak.info
It turns out variants follow regional patterns.
California’s cases are mostly attributed to the “California Variants” and Utahns have been infected with those variants more than any others in recent weeks. Those variants aren’t common at all west of the Rockies.
New York has the most cases attributed to the, you guessed it, “New York Variants” which is also prominent in other Northeastern states.
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But the now-famous U.K. Variant is likely to soon become dominant everywhere because it is more infectious. It already is the most common form of COVID-19 in Texas, Florida and many other states.
In Utah, the British variant has been gradually overtaking California variants in terms of prevalence and it may already be more common because this type of tracking, called “genomic surveillance” always lags.
It’s believed that our vaccines are effective against all three of these common variants.