Posted on 04/21/2020 12:46:06 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
But the weaker mutation did not mean a lower risk for everybody, according to Li’s study. In Zhejiang, two patients in their 30s and 50s who contracted the weaker strain became severely ill. Although both survived in the end, the elder patient needed treatment in an intensive care unit.
This has dire implications if true.
Scientists believed that the virus’s different strains weren’t meaningfully different from each other, which is why they were optimistic that a vaccine would have long-lasting effect. We could vaccinate against the baseline virus and be confident that it would confer immunity against COVID’s many distinct mutations.
Now here comes a Chinese study challenging the conventional wisdom. If you use basic techniques to distinguish one strain from another then yes, they all look more or less alike. But if you use “ultra-deep” genome sequencing, you begin to see subtle differences with potentially momentous consequences.
Even if we believe that China’s cooking the books, it’s conceivable that the early strain that spread in Wuhan was less deadly than later mutations in other countries. Which would be ominous, as it would leave us to wonder how much more deadly the virus might get as it continues to mutate.
Sounds like something right out of Adam the Schiff’s playbook..
Here we go... The end is near.
clearly, we must remain locked-down forever!
Shelter in place!
Interesting.
I have wondered if there are variations.
Nextstrain websit has excellent genomic analysis of cases.
The New York samples tend to differ in clade than others parts of the country.
Polymorphism are not large. How such small variations would confer greater lethality is not known, or if they do.
This makes sense. I know of two groups infected separately.
One group, seven people, everyone got very ill and two died. One has been in the ICU for a long time.
Another group, family of 8, the dad got the sniffles and no one else had symptoms.
Always concerned me that it could mutate into Dos Equis or some other Mexican beer.
And coming from Chinese Communists we believe anything they say right?
Here is another concern regarding the implications of this study IF TRUE:
Does the Chinese study help explain why many tests are so inaccurate?
Is it possible that some strains of the virus have diverged from each other so much that a diagnostic test targeting one would fail to detect another?
If you’re infected by one strain of the virus, are the antibodies left in your system effective against other strains? That’s really a variation of the vaccine question.
The Spanish flu mutated into the final, deadly edition.
Mutation also frustrates making a vaccine. The bug is a moving target. That’s why they change flu shots each year.
RE: And coming from Chinese Communists we believe anything they say right?
It’s from a Chinese SCIENTIST. Not all Chinese are political. The science should be judged on its own merits.
If he publishes the study in a reputable journal and the study can be replicated then we can’t simply use the Chicom label as an excuse to disregard the results.
May as well pass out the cyanide pills.
One solution would be this -— Find a strain of the virus that produces few symptoms but triggers enough antibodies to fend off more deadly strains of the disease and you have an effective partial vaccine.This would be worth it if you knew that the version of the disease you were infected with had far more upside than downside risk.
Seems like the first step in figuring out if the Chinese study is correct would be to sequence different strains around the country in a basic way and see which ones have higher concentrations of the New York/Europe strain and which don’t.
Is the strain more common in areas where deaths and hospitalizations are higher? If so, what do we do about isolating those regions — and controlling travel from Europe, since we won’t want anyone importing that strain once we’ve contained it here?
Here’s another irony — It’s conceivable that we’d have more to fear from travel from NATO countries than we do from China.
Natural selection causes viruses to mutate towards being less deadly. A virus that kills it’s host is a Darwinian dead-ender.
Commie’s suck.
This is not the first coronavirus. They’ve always been around. They cause colds. We’ve never had a vaccine for the common cold.
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