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Monday, July 6th, 2020

Coronavirus mutation has taken over the world. Scientists are trying to understand why.

Author:     Sarah Kaplan and Joel Achenbach,
Source:     LMTonline/Washington Post
Publication Date:     3:37 pm CDT, Monday, June 29, 2020
 Link: Coronavirus mutation has taken over the world. Scientists are trying to understand why.
Stephan:   The Covid-19 coronavirus (19 because it was first detected in 2019) is a mutation or, more accurately, one stage of a mutation. The nations of the world, through the UN, should be putting together an international pandemic task force to track these mutations, and each country should be establishing some kind of agency or department to plan, prepare, and put into place around the country the supplies needed for pandemics. This is only the beginning. Instead, we have a president and an administration that is acting like this pandemic is nothing to worry about, back to normal, everything handled. That even as 128,000 people are dead and over 2 million cases have been reported. Donald Trump and Mike Pence are mass murderers, and I think that is how history will treat them.

When the first coronavirus cases in Chicago appeared in January, they bore the same genetic signatures as a germ that emerged in China weeks before.

But as Egon Ozer, an infectious-disease specialist at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, examined the genetic structure of virus samples from local patients, he noticed something different.

A change in the virus was appearing again and again. This mutation, associated with outbreaks in Europe and New York, eventually took over the city. By May, it was found in 95% of all the genomes Ozer sequenced.

At a glance, the mutation seemed trivial. About 1,300 amino acids serve as building blocks for a protein on the surface of the virus. In the mutant virus, the genetic instructions for just one of those amino acids – number 614 – switched in the new variant from a “D” (shorthand for aspartic acid) to a “G” (short for glycine).

But the location was significant, because the switch occurred in the part of the genome that codes for the all-important “spike protein” – the protruding structure that gives the coronavirus its crownlike […]

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