BREAKING! COVID-19 Warning: Study Shows Of Spike Mutations Of SARS-CoV-2, Making It More Transmissible And Dangerous.The Reality Is That There Is Unlikely To Be A Vaccine
Source: COVID-19 Warning
COVID-19 Warning: Disturbing news is emerging as research findings from a collaborative study involving medical, genomic and virology researchers from Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico-US, University Of Sheffield-UK, Duke University in North Carolina-US, Sheffield Teaching Hospital-UK and the NHS-Foundation-UK, show that the Spike elements of SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus is mutating in a manner that indicates it is evolving to become stronger and more easily transmissible to humans and at the same time becoming more clinically harmful to humans.
Fig. 1.
Phylogenetic Trees based on 4,535 trimmed full genome SARS C0V02 alignments from GISAID.
A) A basic neighbor joining tree, centered on the Wuhan reference strain, with the GISAID G clade (named for the D614G mutation, though a total of 3 base changes define the clade) are highlighted in yellow. The regions of the world where sequences were sampled are indicated by colors. By early April, G614 was more common than the original D614 form isolated from Wuhan, and rather than being restricted to Europe (red) it had begun to spread globally. B) The same tree expanded to show interesting patterns of Spike mutations that we are tracking against the backdrop of the phylogenetic tree based on the full genome. Note three distinct patterns: mutations that predominantly appear to be part of a single lineage (P1263L, orange in the UK and Australia, and also A831V, red, in Iceland); a mutation that is found in very different regions both geographically and in the phylogeny, indicating the same mutation seems to be independently arising and sampled (L5F green, rare but found in scattered locations worldwide); and a mutation in sequences from the same geographic location, but arising in very distinct lineages in the phylogeny (S943P), blue, found only in Belgium. A chart showing how GISAID sequence submissions increase daily is provided in Fig. S1. The tree shown here can be recreated with contemporary data downloaded from GISAID at www.cov.lanl.gov. The tree shown here was created using PAUP (Swofford, 2003); the trees generated for the website pipeline updates are based on parsimony (Goloboff, 2014).
Fig. 2.
The proportion of sequences carrying the D614G mutation is increasing in every region that was well sampled in the GISAID database through the month of March.
- A) A table showing the tallies of each form, D614 and G614 in different countries and regions, starting with samples collected prior to March 1, then following in 10 day intervals. B) Bar charts illustrating the relative frequencies of the original Wuhan form (D614, orange), and the form that first emerged in Europe (G614, blue) based on the numbers in part (A). A variation of this figure showing actual tallies rather than frequencies, so the height of the bars represents the sample size, is provided as Fig. S2. C) A global mapping of the two forms illustrated by pie charts over the same periods. The size of the circle represents sampling. An interactive version of this map of the April 13th data, allowing one to change scale and drill down in to specific regions of the world is available at https://cov.lanl.gov/apps/covid-19/map, and daily updates of this map based on contemporary data from GISAID are provided at cov.lanl.gov.
Fig. 3.
Running weekly average counts showing the relative amount of D614 (orange) and G614, (blue) in different regions of the world.
In almost every case soon after G614 enters a region, it begins to dominate the sample. Fig. S3 shows the same data, illustrated as a daily cumulative plot. Plots were generated with Python Matplotlib (Hunter, 2007). The plots shown here and in Fig. S3 can be recreated with contemporary data from GISAID at www.cov.lanl.gov.