We all know about the new UK strain (every other headline is about how it’s been detected all over the world already, that some tests might not be able to detect it, and that the vaccinations might need to be updated), but did you hear about the others?
Scientists detect new strain of coronavirus in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Another new coronavirus strain found in Nigeria: Africa CDC
My impulse is to find it fishy (NOT to question the science, but rather the policy) when weird patterns emerge. Fear mongering, or what?
It’s statistics - if virus has millions of hosts, it is that much likelier to mutate (as a species) than in thousands of hosts. And if one mutation makes it that much more transmissible, it is even likely you will have convergent independent mutations.
To slightly expand on that point: viruses are tiny malignant code, which can only do one thing: hijack cellular machinery and remake itself. Due to imperfections in the replication of dna/rna (of the top of my head chances are 1 in 10000-100000 per base pair, plus control machinery also makes it lower), this dna slowly mutates (large majority of the mutated viruses are rendered useless however). Because it’s such a high number of viruses in the organism, the correctly assembled viruses still prevail in the numbers. However, while these new viruses spread, some of them are mutated in the more fit direction and they then enter darwinian selection, as some are more transmissible or safer and spread further in population. Large majority of reported mutations are completely invisible though.
