How fast can the coronavirus mutate?

[admin]

The new coronavirus, like all other viruses, mutates, or undergoes small changes in its genome.

How fast can the coronavirus mutate? : Read more

 

[lukex5]

A virus would more likely to spread after mutating into a less deadly version. If you kill your host you have less opportunity to infect new hosts.

 

[ColinJD]

lukex5. This is what everybody seems to forget about viruses. A healthy host means a successful environment for the virus to maintain its existence. As this virus is new to Humans it has many weaknesses the principal one being that it is allowing the hosts to infect others before continuing to cause the host to become a fatality. This weakness is why the Wuhan testing and containment methodology may actually work. However, it relies on the asymptomatic carriers to spread the disease and public acceptance of a large number of fatalities

 

[LisaSummit2]

A virus would more likely to spread after mutating into a less deadly version. If you kill your host you have less opportunity to infect new hosts.

Pretty sure I just read total opposite of that today. I think it gets stronger.

 

[Dausuul]

Pretty sure I just read total opposite of that today. I think it gets stronger.

The virus is not trying to kill us. It may look that way from our perspective--but from the virus's perspective, it's just trying to replicate itself as many times as it can. For the virus, getting "stronger" means getting better at spreading, not getting better at killing.

Killing your hosts before you can spread--or making them so sick that they isolate themselves--is a fatal mistake for any virus. That's why SARS didn't take off like this. It was *too* deadly, and as a result it could be contained and stamped out. COVID-19 hits the worst possible balance: It's deadly enough to kill millions, but not so deadly that it burns out its host pool before it can spread.

 

[moonyarn]

lukex5. This is what everybody seems to forget about viruses. A healthy host means a successful environment for the virus to maintain its existence. As this virus is new to Humans it has many weaknesses the principal one being that it is allowing the hosts to infect others before continuing to cause the host to become a fatality. This weakness is why the Wuhan testing and containment methodology may actually work. However, it relies on the asymptomatic carriers to spread the disease and public acceptance of a large number of fatalities

The virus is not trying to kill us. It may look that way from our perspective--but from the virus's perspective, it's just trying to replicate itself as many times as it can. For the virus, getting "stronger" means getting better at spreading, not getting better at killing.

Killing your hosts before you can spread--or making them so sick that they isolate themselves--is a fatal mistake for any virus. That's why SARS didn't take off like this. It was *too* deadly, and as a result it could be contained and stamped out. COVID-19 hits the worst possible balance: It's deadly enough to kill millions, but not so deadly that it burns out its host pool before it can spread.

Absolutely agree. It appears that a number of retroviruses have successfully become part of the human genome, and are expressed in the way we form our placenta compared with other mammals. That's real success for a virus - infecting every single possible host, and being reliably passed on every time!

 

[moiradolanmd]

Absolutely agree. It appears that a number of retroviruses have successfully become part of the human genome, and are expressed in the way we form our placenta compared with other mammals. That's real success for a virus - infecting every single possible host, and being reliably passed on every time!

Well stated, thank you.

 

[Abbass]

lukex5. This is what everybody seems to forget about viruses. A healthy host means a successful environment for the virus to maintain its existence. As this virus is new to Humans it has many weaknesses the principal one being that it is allowing the hosts to infect others before continuing to cause the host to become a fatality. This weakness is why the Wuhan testing and containment methodology may actually work. However, it relies on the asymptomatic carriers to spread the disease and public acceptance of a large number of fatalities

I fail to see how this is a weakness. It is not a single organism and every virus cell is expendable. The fact it allows the host to infect others before killing the host is anything but a weakness. It eliminates the usual limitation on viruses which are too deadly to allow their own spread to continue far. The fact is that new or not, it doesn't appear to have weaknesses but an uncannily well-stocked bag of tricks which enable it to do what it will amongst the human population. Not exactly what one expects to see in a virus which has supposedly jumped species. However now some weeks after this article, it is clearly mutating far more than presumed, over 30 variants identified so far and still, very limited samples for that suggest many more are out there. It also appears to have been circulating amongst populations and not just in China for much longer. France has discovered there was a strain there well before it came from China or Italy and increasingly it appears to have been in the USA much longer than assumed or admitted. The strange and never resolved vaping illness we saw last year, in fact, would appear to have been this. That was a very strange tale at the time and knowledgable people doubted it's veracity since vaping is not new, and nothing like it ever occurred before. Nor has there been more heard about it in a while. Wuhan is just where it first to a serious hold and maybe that was due to having 'improved itself' enough to go on a rampage or because a conscious effort was involved in spreading it in Wuhan by some party or parties.

 

[Abbass]

The virus is not trying to kill us. It may look that way from our perspective--but from the virus's perspective, it's just trying to replicate itself as many times as it can. For the virus, getting "stronger" means getting better at spreading, not getting better at killing.

Killing your hosts before you can spread--or making them so sick that they isolate themselves--is a fatal mistake for any virus. That's why SARS didn't take off like this. It was *too* deadly, and as a result, it could be contained and stamped out. COVID-19 hits the worst possible balance: It's deadly enough to kill millions, but not so deadly that it burns out its host pool before it can spread.

That is all well and good for a natural virus. This one is anything but. There have been conflicting reports but clearly there is an effort to keep a lid on the laboratory origins of this. One of the world's best Microbiologists, Montagnier , who received a Nobel prize for the discovery of HIV has stated categorically it is the product of gene editing. There have been plenty of other such reports and the withdrawal of the claims in some cases doesn't change the science, just their courage in speaking about it. It has way too many tricks up its sleeve for a natural virus anyway. Of course, nature tends to eliminate such artificial constructs but in the meantime, it has been 'programmed' to do a job and it seems fairly obvious that is not to give scientists a new fun game to play.