williamwright wrote:
On 13/04/2021 17:03, Rod Speed wrote:
Highlights it is the number and duration of infection that increase
likelihood of mutation;
"With almost every person it infects, the virus changes very subtly €“

Thats mindless bull****. There arent that many variants.

So yer a virologist now as well as a bighead?

Bill

https://nextstrain.org/sars-cov-2#sit-reps

https://academic.oup.com/bioinformat...3/4121/5001388

See figure 1

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/...t-tracker.html

Someone here, maybe a year ago, showed a much nicer version of figure 1,
with way more dots on it.

It has the same mutation capability, as seasonal flu does.

Seasonal flu, you can't use the same "vat of stew" as last year.
The vat may say something like "H7N9" on the side, but it's
not the exact same from year to year.

And that's what we don't want to happen. We don't want this
to be seasonal flu. But it's sure looking that way at times.

The deal is, the mutations to date, have been pretty good
to us. It didn't become as bad as measles (high infection rate),
or we'd be ****ed. We'd all be on N95 masks if that happened.

It's when you put "selection pressure" on a pest, that
you find out what it's really made of. And whether it has
staying power. Obviously, seasonal flu is a champ at
what it does. Notice how this one, it successfully attacks
multiple animals, but it's not really "optimized" for any of
them, and then it's a matter of what the mutations do,
as to whether it can "tune up" for the animal its in.
That's why we're watching it, and making our little diagrams,
to figure out whether it can be stamped out, or it is here
to stay. The mutation capability is what matters.

Not all mutations are viable. Some of them can't even
reproduce. Even if a mutation can reproduce, if the
body easily defeats it, it's still a dead end. And that's
why the diagram doesn't have millions of dots, because
the rubbish experiments it's doing, don't leave a trace.
It's the successful ones, that get assigned a dot.
And only the "variants of concern", that get their
own portrait photo at the portrait studio.

Paul