How many strains of mutated Covid are there?

[Throck]

I'm watching NBC nightly news now and they indicated there's a new strain out of South Africa. There's the original strain, there's a second strain with no origins mentioned. There's a third strain from England that is now popping up in the US. Are there 4 strains?

The South African strain popped up in hard-core travel band England and the third strain from England has hit California, Colorado and New York. Is it mutating locally or are random people carrying it?

What didn't I hear correctly?

[TexasLefty29]

1. The last I heard/read

On the CDC website (taken w a grain of salt) they describe a UK, South Africa, and Nigeria variant. Nigerian being separate from South Africa.
And there was mention of US variant, but that was sort of “debunked” ... that’s too big of a can of worms, IMO, because (again, sorry, last I read) we have only “sequenced 51k of the 20mil cases” ... so how tf would we know?

[Archetypist]

2. dozens

but a few are more prominent

[soothsayer]

3. I believe there are thousands of variants already

I vaguely recall fauci or Gupta saying 1400 in the summer maybe. But most mutations don’t do much.

They’re just talking about a few variants thought to spread more easily, and yeah, UK, SA, and Italy have their own strains.

We’ve got a few cases of these in the US.

[abqtommy]

4. Even if we get the vaccine that doesn't mean we won't need to keep the basic masking,

distancing and sanitizing/hand-washing going. That is if we want to survive.

[Dem2]

5. 28? 29?

I was listening to NPR this morning and that was the number of known mutations quoted.