Now-dominant new strain appears to be more contagious than original
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"One researcher, commenting on Twitter, called the story “crap.”
Another Tweeted, “With hyper-intense interest in covid, papers get amplified by journalists who lack the expertise to critique or contextualize them.”
Another wrote that it “Messes up the (general population), but we’re in a spin already.”"
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@Doctor-Phibes said in Now-dominant new strain appears to be more contagious than original:
"One researcher, commenting on Twitter, called the story “crap.”
Another Tweeted, “With hyper-intense interest in covid, papers get amplified by journalists who lack the expertise to critique or contextualize them.”
Another wrote that it “Messes up the (general population), but we’re in a spin already.”"
@Doctor-Phibes said in Now-dominant new strain appears to be more contagious than original:
"One researcher, commenting on Twitter, called the story “crap.”
Another Tweeted, “With hyper-intense interest in covid, papers get amplified by journalists who lack the expertise to critique or contextualize them.”
Another wrote that it “Messes up the (general population), but we’re in a spin already.”"
I was hoping the piece would refute the new evidence. It didn’t.
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Not a refutation, but there's quite a bit of doubt being expressed, and also criticism of the initial study.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/health/article/New-dominant-strain-of-coronavirus-reported-15248094.php
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It’s generally agreed the outbreaks of covid-19 that have swept across the world largely originated from strains of the virus that emerged from Europe, following the introduction of the virus from China last year. But that doesn’t necessarily indicate the virus meaningfully changed there to accomplish this feat.
“The great majority of sequenced isolates now descend from the European outbreak, which has spread more extensively than the Chinese one. That could be because it is more transmissible, but it could also be because the relatively late interventions allowed it to spread more,” Hanage told Gizmodo.
In other words, the G614 mutation may not have any effect on how contagious the virus is; it might have just hitched a ride onto strains of the virus that were spread from Europe to everywhere else. And while Hanage does think that the authors have some interesting evidence suggesting the mutation could plausibly improve the virus’s ability to spread, it’s not conclusive.
Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at Columbia University, is even more skeptical of the team’s conclusions than Hanage.
“They didn’t do a single experiment, and this is all conjecture,” she told Gizmodo. “There’s no indication that this mutation makes the virus more transmissible, and they’ve done nothing to show that this mutation is functionally significant.”
Research into covid-19 has progressed faster than science typically does. Researchers (and journalists) have had to balance the need for accuracy with the public health risks. In releasing their paper, the authors said they felt an urgent need for an “early warning” pipeline to track changes in the evolution of the virus’s spike protein. That’s because the spike protein is what scientists are aiming to target with potential vaccines and treatments. Any truly relevant mutations there could seriously impact those efforts and may even make survivors vulnerable to a second infection.
But viruses mutate all the time, and most mutations end up not affecting how the virus spreads or sickens people. For now, the jury is still out on whether these preliminary findings by the Los Alamos team mean anything. That said, the current pandemic is plenty scary enough, mutated virus or not.
“It bears watching, but it also bears skepticism,” Hanage said.
