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Houston is the nation’s first city to record every major variant of the novel coronavirus — many of which are more contagious than the original strain. “The numbers of the major variants we have identified in our large sequencing study are disquieting,” said Dr. James Musser, who leads the team of experts at Houston Methodist Hospital behind the new finding. “The genome data indicate that these important variants are now geographically widely distributed in the Houston metropolitan region.” (Downen and Garcia, 3/1)

About 735 cases of a coronavirus variant that emerged in New York City in November have now been identified in the U.S., including 585 in the last two weeks, a federal health official said. The mutation has traveled extensively through the metropolitan New York region, and individual cases have also been found in 14 other states, including Texas, Wyoming and Maryland, according to Gregory Armstrong, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advanced Molecular Detection Program. (Court, Wingrove and Fabian, 3/1)

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, on Monday urged a close watch of a coronavirus variant recently detected in New York. "We certainly are taking the New York variant, the 526 [referring to B.1.526] very seriously," Fauci said during a White House briefing, later adding, "We have to really keep an eye on that for its ability to evade both monoclonal antibodies and to a certain extent, the vaccine-induced antibodies, so it’s something we take very, very seriously." Fauci noted unknowns associated with the variant, like the degree and persistence of viral load in the nasopharynx, and whether variants emerge in immunocompromised individuals. His comments came after reporter Laurie Garrett questioned whether the variant first emerged in an HIV/AIDs patient. (Rivas, 3/1)

Three studies offer a sobering history of P.1’s meteoric rise in the Amazonian city of Manaus. It most likely arose there in November and then fueled a record-breaking spike of coronavirus cases. It came to dominate the city partly because of an increased contagiousness, the research found. But it also gained the ability to infect some people who had immunity from previous bouts of Covid-19. And laboratory experiments suggest that P.1 could weaken the protective effect of a Chinese vaccine now in use in Brazil. (Zimmer, 3/1)