3 ms·

What would make it more deadly? AFAIK second wave of 1918 was a mutated virus. This one is more stable and has now significant mutations yet.

• throwaway_pdp09 7y ago
  Good question, I don't know. Maybe the much milder strain went by so quistly there was no testing for a novel disease so we never knew. I don't know if that's plausible though.
• MarkusQ 7y ago
  I don't know what you mean by "now significant mutations" but there are quite a number (hundreds) of known cov-19 mutant circulating. https://nextstrain.org/ncov?c=country&l=unrooted https://nextstrain.org/ncov?c=country&l=unrooted
  • Symmetry 7y ago
    It means that most of those genetic variants don't change which proteins are coded for (the genetic code is redundant) and the remaining ones don't make any difference to disease progression. Well, there was one mutation in Singapore where one of the non-structural proteins got knocked out creating a strain that was less virulent but better able to hide from the immune system. Zoonaotic diseases usually become less virulent over time in general and a strain like that might become dominant after a number of years. But don't expect any noticeable changes in during the current outbreak except maybe in a few small pockets.
    • MarkusQ 7y ago
      The ambiguity I was addressing was grammatical, not biological. "now significant" could be a typo for "known significant", "non-significant", "no significant", "not significant", and possibly others, including not being a typo at all. Likewise "significant" itself could mean different things in this context. E.g. phenotype neutral mutations can be highly informative when tracing origins, mutations in "non-coding" regions can have huge regulatory effects, etc. I agree that your interpretation of the post to which I responded is plausible, but it's not the only one.