(Yawn)
Viruses gonna virus.
It’s what they do.
Been doin’ it since The Beginning.
Nobody knows anything about COVID-19, except that it doesn’t behave like ny other virus ever known by medical science. It can kill up to 3 % of those infected, even though it decides to only kill .2%. It can infect someone 2 or 3 times because the human immune system can’t make antibodies for it even after a vaccine is developed, and any antibodies made don’t work like they do on every other known virus. It can be transmitted by droplets in the air that can remain suspended for hours, it can’t be killed by sunlight. It can spread over vast distances, even through masks and rubber gloves. It is so insidious that you can catch it and never know you had it because it can infect you without causing any symptoms. This way it can be spread around a population multiple times without killing people until maybe the third or fourth time they get it. Everyone can catch it ven when everyone has already had it and either died or recovered. Actually the one thing that is known about COVID-19 is that you can become immune to it by dying. That’s why so few people are immune.
Of course it is “mutating”, it is replicating. What they do not want you to know is that there is always a slight mistake in replication, and very rarely is that “mutation” a benefit for the virus.
Mutation is adaptation. If the virus kills the host it won’t be able to spread. Natural selection is at work. The virus that doesn’t kill the host, spreads. Thus all of the subsequent viruses are less destructive to their hosts. The only hosts that die are the weak ones. Eventually only the weakest hosts will die. Pretty much what is already happening.
The coronavirus is mutating — does it matter?
“ Viruses that encode their genome in RNA, such as SARS-CoV-2, HIV and influenza, tend to pick up mutations quickly
as they are copied inside their hosts, because enzymes that copy RNA are prone to making errors.
After the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) virus began circulating in humans, for instance,
it developed a kind of mutation called a deletion that might have slowed its spread."
"But sequencing data suggest that coronaviruses change more slowly than most other RNA viruses,
probably because of a ‘proofreading’ enzyme that corrects potentially fatal copying mistakes.
A typical SARS-CoV-2 virus accumulates only two single-letter mutations per month in its genome — a rate of change about half that of influenza and one-quarter that of HIV ...”
My Comment : The blessing of mutations is that the mutations tend to slow and self-limit the virus,
that is that they are self-detrimental .
The mutations change the efficacy of the virus, and in fact, generally weaken it.
All viruses mutate. Most tend to mutate weaker not stronger.