According to a new study led by scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory, a new strain of coronavirus has become dominant worldwide and it seems to be more contagious than the early version of the COVID-19.
A dangerous new strain
The new strain was discovered in February in Europe, and it migrated fast to the East Coast of the United States and it has been the dominant strain across the world since mid-March. Aside from spreading a lot faster, the new strain may make people vulnerable to a second infection.
The report was posted on BioRxiv, a website that researchers use to share their work before it is peer-reviewed. It is a way to speed up collaborations with scientists who are working on COVID-19 vaccines or treatments. The research has been based on the genetic sequence of earlier coronavirus strains, which means the vaccine that they are working on now might not be effective against the new one.
Scientists who are working with major organizations working on a vaccine for the coronavirus have stated that they are hoping that the virus is stable and not likely to mutate the way the influenza virus does, as it will require a new vaccine.
The virus mutation written in the report affects the spikes on the exterior of the coronavirus, which allow it to enter human respiratory cells. The authors of the report said that they felt an urgent need for an early warning so that vaccines and drugs under development around the world will be effective against the strain that is said to have mutated.
In the places where the new strain was discovered, it infected far more people than the earlier strains that came out of Wuhan, and it infected people fast. Within weeks, the new strain was prevalent in some nations. The new strain's dominance over its predecessors shows that it is more infectious though the reason why it is highly contagious is still unknown.
New coronavirus
The coronavirus, also known as COVID-19, has infected more than 3.5 million people around the world and it has caused more than 250,000 deaths since it started to spread late last year. The report about the new strain was based on a computational analysis of more than 6,000 coronavirus sequences from around the world.
The data was collected by the Global Initiative for Sharing All Influenza Data, a public-private organization in Germany. The analysis found the new version was transitioning to become dominant.
The Los Alamos team is assisted by the University of Sheffield in England and Duke University and has identified 14 mutations. The mutations happened among the 30,000 base pairs of RNA that make up the genome of the coronavirus. The report authors focused on a mutation called D614G, which is responsible for the change in the spikes of the virus.
Bette Korber, a computational biologist at Los Alamos, wrote on her Facebook page and said that the story is worrying as they are seeing a mutated form of the virus and it is rapidly emerging. She added that when mutated viruses enter a population, they rapidly begin to take over the pandemic and they are more transmissible.
