quote:

At least eight strains of the coronavirusare making their way around the globe, creating a trail of death and disease that scientists are tracking by their genetic footprints.

While much is unknown, hidden in the virus's unique microscopic fragments are clues to the origins of its original strain, how it behaves as it mutates and which strains are turning into conflagrations while others are dying out thanks to quarantine measures.

Huddled in once bustling and now almost empty labs, researchers who oversaw dozens of projects are instead focused on one goal: tracking the current strains of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that cause the illness COVID-19.

Labs around the world are turning their sequencing machines, most about the size of a desktop printer, to the task of rapidly sequencing the genomes of virus samples taken from people sick with COVID-19. The information is uploaded to a website called NextStrain.org that shows how the virus is migrating and splitting into similar but new subtypes.

While researchers caution they're only seeing the tip of the iceberg, the tiny differences between the virus strains suggest shelter-in-place orders are working in some areas and that no one strain of the virus is more deadly than another. They also say it does not appear the strains will grow more lethal as they evolve.

“The virus mutates so slowly that the virus strains are fundamentally very similar to each other,” said Charles Chiu, a professor of medicine and infectious disease at the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine.

quote:

The virus did not come from a lab
While there remain many questions about the trajectory of the COVID-19 disease outbreak, one thing is broadly accepted in the scientific community: The virus was not created in a lab but naturally evolved in an animal host.

SARS-CoV-2’s genomic molecular structure – think the backbone of the virus – is closest to a coronavirus found in bats. Parts of its structure also resemble a virus found in scaly anteaters, according to a paper published earlier this month in the journal Nature Medicine.

Someone manufacturing a virus targeting people would have started with one that attacked humans, wrote National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins in an editorial that accompanied the paper.

Andersen was lead author on the paper. He said it could have been a one-time occurrence.

“It’s possible it was a single event, from a single animal to a single human,” and spread from there.

https://www.usatoday.com/story...mutation/5080571002/

Two important questions, then, are: If you had one strain and (we hope) developed antibodies, will that give you immunity to the other strains? Similarly, if we can develop a vaccine, will it be specific to one strain, or will it protect against all of them?

quote:

Originally posted by pianojuggler:
Two important questions, then, are: If you had one strain and (we hope) developed antibodies, will that give you immunity to the other strains? Similarly, if we can develop a vaccine, will it be specific to one strain, or will it protect against all of them?

Absolutely THE questions to ask, pj.

The genetic virologist I follow from UW says this is misleading.

https://twitter.com/trvrb/status/1244750382338719745

Read the whole thread.

There are many versions of Corona Virus from bats.

This show a few years ago discussed it...There will be more..

Many Corona Viruses in Bats

quote:

Originally posted by pianojuggler:
Two important questions, then, are: If you had one strain and (we hope) developed antibodies, will that give you immunity to the other strains? Similarly, if we can develop a vaccine, will it be specific to one strain, or will it protect against all of them?

So when you have a cold (or flu) are you immune to all colds? Not likely...and some colds are version of Corona virus..

I must say as predictable as this news is, it sort of socked me in the stomach. Reading about the 1918 pandemic (it was during WWI!!) - a new pasttime - reveals they went through at least two onslaughts in this country. The second was in the Fall of the same year.

Can't recall any info about immunity from one to the other, but the second had mutated into a much more lethal form.

I guess this is why great personalities like Fauci are in the right place at the right time - to give news(and advice) to an anxious public in the best possible way. (Apart from his being such a brilliant doctor).

HE said a new wave would likely be a milder kind, and I sure hope it's based on his expertise and not to reassure. I guess everybody has by now heard that a second wave is a virtually certainty, if only because of the change of seasons (expected in the Fall).

For one thing, they are seeing this phenomenon below the equator (for instance, in Australia). No comments about whether the new wave is genomically the same, or whether former patients are getting sick again from the new infection. And of course there's China and SE Asian countries (NOT below the equator).

There's a lot of talk about media transparency re this pandemic, and I can see an argument to be made for a bit of toning down. FWIW friends have told me they have had FB posts censored. Always those containing talk which might be considered castrophic virus "news". Perhaps Zuckerman has finally found a censorship-worthy topic. Wonder if he's acting under advisement or even cooperating with the government.

quote:

Geneticists from Britain and Germany have mapped the evolutionary path of the coronavirus that causes Covid-19 and determined there are currently three versions of it spreading around the world.

The discovery of how the variants were formed and then spread could help scientists to identify its source and explain why it is so contagious.
The researchers analysed the first 160 complete viral genomes sequenced from human patients between December 24 and March 4, then reconstructed the early evolutionary pathway of Covid-19 in humans through its mutations.

“There are too many rapid mutations to neatly trace a Covid-19 family tree. We used a mathematical network algorithm to visualise all the plausible trees simultaneously,” said Peter Forster, a geneticist at University of Cambridge and lead author of the study.

“These techniques are mostly known for mapping the movements of prehistoric human populations through DNA. We think this is one of the first times they have been used to trace the infection routes of a coronavirus like Covid-19,” he said in a report about the study on the university’s website.

quote:

“The virus mutates during spreading and has become more adapted to transmission among humans in different populations from different countries,” he said.

But as the variants were related to each other, tracking mutations within different groups could help to determine the origin of the virus, he said.

“This research indicates that the spread of the virus is increasingly adapted to different populations and therefore the pandemic needs to be taken seriously,” Lu said.

“People need to pay more attention to prevention and control … the virus may coexist with humans for a long time.”

https://www.scmp.com/news/chin...nts-researchers-find

so much more to learn about this virus...

quote:

Originally posted by jon-nyc:
The genetic virologist I follow from UW says this is misleading.

https://twitter.com/trvrb/status/1244750382338719745

Read the whole thread.

Excellent.