Scientist and Health Officials have discovered 8 variants of COVID-19. The most widely known Variants are:
Variant A
Variant B
Variant C
Variant D
Variant E
Variant A was found up and down the West Coast of the US, in Australia, and a mutated version of A was found in American’s that have lived in Wuhan and then moved to the East Coast. Variant A wasn’t deadly and explains why many in the west coast may have immunity.
Variant B is a mutation variant from Variant A, which is the deadly strain of COVID-19 found mostly in east China.
Variant C is a mutation of B and found in Europe.
All variants of COVID-19 (A,B,C,D,E) are found in the US only.
The Variant most similar genetically to the Bat’s is Variant A.The majority of the virus that bats carry aren’t transferred to a human directly. Usually there are some other animal sitting in between, in the food chain. For instance, a bat may bite a cow and the cow later transfer the virus to humans ( either it is eaten or some other ways ).
Which explains how the deadly mutated Variant B came about.
Seriously, there are mutations, but they are very minor and are not known to cause any substantive change to the virus. They are about the same a getting the same model car with leather or cloth seats.
Exactly. We do know about the different strains, and the really neat way it allows tracing of infection routes. But what there isn’t is any known difference between them in terms of deadliness. So why the deadly mutated B? It is no more and no less deadly than the others.
According to this pre-publication summary, 84 intra-host variants of COVID-19 have been identified, but there is no evidence that any of the mutations are contagious.
Looking at an illustration of all known results (which I can’t find again), it appears that every single time the virus is sequenced there is a slightly different result. Then other researchers choose one variant element and use that to group the results.
They used a computer modeling system to present a model. There’s a lot of “could be” and softening statements in that. Nothing in that cite says what you said, about the virulence of any given strains. The information also hasn’t been peer-reviewed. I did look at the paper just published by this team. Again, no information on how deadly a strain is, and, given the extremely small sample size on some of these branches I don’t see how they could draw those conclusions at all.
If anyone can find more details on the methodology or modeling, I will have my husband take a look. He’s got a PhD and several years of industry experience that are directly applicable to this.
I read through the PNAS article, and I think I see where the immunity confusion comes from. Variant B (in the PNAS article) is a variant found only in East Asia. The authors drop the unsupported hypothesis that the reason it is not found outside of East Asia is that the variant is adapted to East Asians, and non-East Asians are resistant to it. Variants descended from B do show up in non-East Asians. This is just their throwaway line of one reason why the B type is not observed outside of East Asia, and they don’t present any data to support the hypothesis. That isn’t a problem, as any scientist reading it is going to do one of a few things: they’re just guessing about an oddity, no big deal [keep reading]; why would they think that [lower opinion of authors]; or cool, I have some ideas on testing that hypothesis [get to work]; etc.
The authors used various network analysis software designed to build these trees based on mutations. Exactly which algorithm is best, and exactly what parameters to use are the kind of thing that should shake out in the peer review process. Many of those things are just opinions, with no “right” answer. Different algorithms will have different advantages and disadvantages, different biases, and such. I’ve done stuff similar to this, but it was so many years ago that I don’t have any expertise to judge if what they are doing is the best thing to do. It is probably pretty good, as I doubt they’d have gotten as far in the publishing process as they did if it was completely inappropriate.