A paper published in the National Science Review shows that coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is mutating with at least 2 types of the virus now existing.
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Conducted by a team of doctors from Peking University’s School of Life Sciences and the Institut Pasteur of Shanghai, the preliminary research points to the more aggressive strain affecting 70% of the 103 sequenced genomes analyzed in the study with the less aggressive strain affecting 30%.
The more aggressive strain has been dubbed the “L type” while the less aggressive strain has been dubbed the “S type.” It is important to note that the L type may be more prevalent, but it is actually the S type which is the ancestral version.
The researchers also note that the frequency of infection of the L type has already started to taper off.
“Whereas the L type was more prevalent in the early stages of the outbreak in Wuhan, the frequency of the L type decreased after early January 2020,” they write. “Human intervention may have placed more severe selective pressure on the L type, which might be more aggressive and spread more quickly.”
However, they caution that the L type “might have increased in relative frequency due to relatively weaker selective pressure.”
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The research team caveats that the data available for the study was limited and requires further investigation.
“These findings strongly support an urgent need for further immediate, comprehensive studies that combine genomic data, epidemiological data, and chart records of the clinical symptoms of patients with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19).”
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