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?
Yeah covid is going to jump out of a bush really fast and yell “Boo!”
Hot take but I’m really not a fan of how this coronavirus thing has been allowed to spread unchecked and is now mutating into even worse forms inside our diseased bodies
I imagine that first wave of news about the UK variant got a lot of clicks and now news media is just throwing shit against the wall to find out what sticks, lol.
It could also be that UK reporters got mad that everyone is calling it the UK variant instead of n501y or something, so now they’re desperate to find some other place elsewhere that has new mutations. No reflection is being done about how people called it China flu or Wuhan flu or whatever back in December - or now, too. Hey, this is the rules you wanted to play with, I dont care if its inaccurate or wrong.
I forget what the word for it is, but there’s a syndrome that we experience where certain events seem like they are clustered together instead of randomly distributed. Like how if you hear about a plane crash on the news, suddenly you’ll hear about three more plane crashes that week. But it’s not that the plane crashes are actually happening together, it’s that they were escaping your attention before you heard about the first one.
A more drastic version of this happens now with news and especially social media. A story breaks about a new virus strain, new virus strains become the hot topic, and now people and the algorithm are sharing stories about virus strains.
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.
