As I went thought my morning ritual checking of my go-to Internet websites with MSNBC on TV in the background and the talk on TV was exclusively about Trump and the election I saw this on what I think is the best aggregate website because it updates constantly and summarizes articles from paywall websites. It was a sidebar story.
The article, “There’s a new mutation of coronavirus — and it’s 10 times worse” on RawStory didn’t provide much information and the included link was to Bloomberg News where I’d exhausted my free clicks. (See below for excerpts since I eventually found the article on Fortune.) Therefore I decided to see what else I could find about (update: what is being reported as) this alarming new mutation and ended up on The Times of India website where they’d published a detailed photo essay about the newly discovered Covid mutation.
I searched some more and among them I were several short articles which were’t very illuminating but then found one on Vice World News which, which was like the Times of India article in that it provided comprehensive information and included several relevant links:
Excerpt:
According to an article by Yale University researcher Nathan Grubaugh and associates in the scientific journal Cell, the impact of the D614G mutation on transmission, disease, and vaccine development remains largely unknown.
Previous research by American biologist Bette Korber and her colleagues at Los Alamos National Laboratory found that the G614 variant has recently replaced D614 as the “dominant pandemic form.” Korber’s research hypothesized that the rapid spread of the new variant meant that it was more infectious than previous strains, though this has yet to be proven.
According to Grubaugh and his colleagues, there is so far no evidence to suggest that the D614G mutation will result in a more severe infection of the COVID-19 disease, though the global expansion of the mutation “means that this variant now is the pandemic.”
Kanta Subbarao, a virologist at the Doherty Institute at the University of Melbourne in Australia, told the Australian Broadcasting Network that viruses “almost never mutate to become more virulent.”
“There's no question that this coronavirus is bad, but its slow mutation rate gives us a really good shot at getting on top of it."
The word “almost” jumped out at me in the above excerpt:
Kanta Subbarao, a virologist at the Doherty Institute at the University of Melbourne in Australia, told the Australian Broadcasting Network that viruses “almost never mutate to become more virulent.”
Here we are watching an election play out where our constitutional republic and our very freedoms and civil rights are at stake, justifiably articles about this are center stage. Trump wants to minimize the dangers of Covid-19 but the virus doesn’t respond to wishful thinking.
I don’t think one has to be a scientist to consider that a virus that can mutate in one part of the world to be far more dangerous can mutate in another form to be equally dangerous anywhere. A traveler doesn’t have to bring the Malaysia Covid to the United States. We have both more infections than any other country and the worst virus response thanks to Trump than just about any other country. With so many people refusing to take recommended precautions for political reasons, more and more people are likely to become infected. Common sense would suggest that this gives Covid more opportunities to mutate here on its own.
There will be those who want to minimize this news. After all, nothing has been peer reviewed and proved yet. These are preliminary reports and warnings. I consider them to be akin to your carbon monoxide detector sounding. You don’t ignore it even though you don’t smell anything. It’s a deadly colorless and orderless gas. You call the fire department.
This is a story that should be on the top of the page of all the major newspapers. It isn’t.
Update: fortune.com/… The Bloomberg article republished. “Is a mutated strain of the coronavirus more infectious? The Philippines wants to find ou”t
Excerpts:
The mutation “is said to have a higher possibility of transmission or infectiousness, but we still don’t have enough solid evidence to say that that will happen,” Philippines’ Health Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire said in a virtual briefing on Monday.
The strain has been found in many other countries and has become the predominant variant in Europe and the U.S., with the World Health Organization saying there’s no evidence the strain leads to a more severe disease. The mutation has also been detected in recent outbreaks in China.
There’s no evidence from the epidemiology that the mutation is considerably more infectious than other strains, said Benjamin Cowling, head of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Hong Kong. “It’s more commonly identified now than it was in the past, which suggests that it might have some kind of competitive advantage over other strains of Covid-19,” he said.
As Southeast Asian countries take various steps to prevent a resurgence while reopening limited travel, they struggle with people breaching quarantine rules after returning from overseas as well as false negative test results at borders.
…………….
The strain “might be a little bit more contagious. We haven’t yet got enough evidence to evaluate that, but there’s no evidence that it’s a lot more contagious,” University of Hong Kong’s Cowling said.
Noor Hisham warned that the strain could mean existing studies on vaccines may be incomplete or ineffective against the mutation. That’s even as a paper published in Cell Press said the mutation is unlikely to have a major impact on the efficacy of vaccines currently being developed.
