‘Mutated’ Coronavirus More Contagious, New Study Suggests

‘Mutated’ Coronavirus More Contagious, New Study Suggests

The novel coronavirus that emerged in Wuhan wet-market of China over four months ago has since mutated and the new, dominant strain spreading across the United States, appears to be more contagious, a new study has said.

The 33-page report, published Thursday on BioRxiv by researchers at the Alamos National Laboratory, said the new strain of COVID-19 virus began spreading in Europe early February before migrating to other parts of the world, including the U.S. and Canada.

“If the coronavirus doesn’t subside in the summer like the seasonal flu, it could mutate further and potentially limit the effectiveness of the coronavirus vaccines being developed by scientists around the world,” the researchers warned.

Mutation is an alteration in the genetic material (the genome) of a cell of a living organism that is more or less permanent and can be transmitted to the cell’s descendants.

The report says some vaccine researchers have been using the virus’s genetic sequences isolated by health authorities early in the outbreak.

“This is hard news,” Bette Korber, a computational biologist at Los Alamos, and the lead author of the study was quoted to have said.

“But please don’t only be disheartened by it,” she continued. “Our team at LANL was able to document this mutation and its impact on transmission only because of a massive global effort of clinical people and experimental groups, who make new sequences of the virus (SARS-CoV-2) in their local communities available as quickly as they possibly can,” Los Angeles Times said she wrote on her Facebook page.

However, the researchers noted that the news of the mutation was of “urgent concern” considering the more than 100 vaccines in the process of being developed to prevent COVID-19, even when the study is yet to be peer-reviewed.

In early March, researchers in China said they found that two different types of coronavirus could be causing infections worldwide.

In a study published on March 3, scientists at Peking University’s School of Life Sciences and the Institute Pasteur of Shanghai found that a more aggressive type of the new coronavirus accounted for roughly 70 per cent of analysed strains, while 30 per cent had been linked to a less aggressive type.

It said the more aggressive and deadly strain of the virus was found to be prevalent in the early stages of the outbreak in Wuhan — the Chinese city where the virus first emerged.

Methodology and findings

The Los Alamos researchers, with the help of scientists at Duke University and the University of Sheffield in England, were able to analyse thousands of coronavirus sequences collected by the Global Initiative for Sharing All Influenza(GISAID), an organization that promotes the rapid sharing of data from all influenza viruses and the coronavirus.

The researchers said the mutation impacts the spike protein, a multifunctional mechanism that allows the virus to enter the host.

To date, the researchers have identified 14 mutations.

The research was supported by funding from the Medical Research Council, the National Institute of Health Research and Genome Research Limited.

According to Worldometer, the global coronavirus tracker, the coronavirus COVID-19 is affecting 212 countries and territories around the world, with two international conveyances.

As of Saturday afternoon, the tracker has it that the world has recorded a total number of 4,043,068 confirmed cases of the diseases, of which 1,403,966 have recovered while 277,016 fatalities have been recorded so far.