Scientists are only beginning to understand these variations and their impact on health outcomes, especially in children.
The November study was published in the journalOpen Forum Infectious Diseases.
An Ever-Changing Virus
Mutations are mistakes that occur in the virus genomeor genetic materialwhen it replicates.
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Most viruses experience some variation as they circulate a population.
In SARS-CoV-2, many of the mutations are insignificant or may even weaken the virus.
Others, however, may affect how easily the virus is transmitted and even how severe the illness is.
“But thats not the way we look at it.
The authors report that it was present in 99.3% of the pediatric samples they collected.
There is not yet any conclusive evidence that this mutation changes the severity of disease symptoms.
The COVID-19 spike protein mediates coronavirus entry into host cell.
The clades 20A, 20B, and 20C are all recently mutated versions of the virus.
But all RNA viruses have a mutation rate.
And the mutation rate of SARS-CoV-2 is about five-fold times slower than influenzaat least it has been to date.
This relatively slow mutation rate can be helpful for scientists trying to get a handle on the novel virus.
Vaccines that have proven effective will still likely protect the body against the virus.
They must also consider the demographics and genetic information of the infected person.
Despite being the largest genomic pediatric COVID-19 survey to date, it only included 141 children.
Thats not actually a very large sample size, Gai says.
We cannot possibly do the correlation analysis for each individual mutation with a disease phenotype.
We need reports like this to get a sense of how the virus is evolving, Ray says.
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Published online November 13, 2020:ofaa551 doi:10.1093/ofid/ofaa551
Callaway E.The coronavirus is mutating does it matter?.Nature.
