USAAll the news not fit to print | ||
Email | Back to History | Back to the world news | Home | Support this website TM, ®, Copyright © 2020 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved. |
One Virus or Two? Can covid-19 mutate into something even more dangerous?23 April 2020We still don't have a rational explanation for the statistical divide: east Asia, Germany, Greece and California versus most of Europe and the east coast of the USA. It's hard to find commonalities in these two groups. You rarely see Holland grouped with Italy, and rarely Greece in the same group with Germany. As more and more testing is being done, the data show that the average German is less likely to get infected and die than the average Italian or Brit. One possible explanation is that Germans have some kind of natural defense. Karl Friston of University College London called it "immunological dark matter" because we cannot see it but the data show that it is out there. However, it should be something in common with South Korea, and we just can't find anything that those two populations they have in common, and NOT have in common with Britain and Italy. This explanation works well to explain the low death rates in the region near Yunnan: see this article.
But there is another explanation.
My humble opinion, based on absolutely no scientific evidence:
(See this excellent graph for how the strains evolve). That's my rational explanation for why the death rates are so different. We see a big divide between the countries where the death rate is max 3% and the places where the death rate is way higher. The places that got the virus early (directly from China) tend to have the low death rate; all the places that got it after Italy seem to have the high death rate. After all, we now know that the "ebola virus" is actually four different ones, for which four different vaccines are required. We know that the "Spanish flu" was actually three waves of flu: first in the USA, then spread by US troops to Europe, then mutated into the virus that killed tens of millions. If i am right, the statistics about the USA are misleading, because they combine the deaths from two different viruses: on the West Coast, where the virus came directly from China, the death rate is low (California: 1400 deaths out of 38000 cases in a state of 40 million people), while on the East Coast, where the virus came from Italy, it is very high (New York: 20000 deaths out of 262000 cases in a state of 20 million people). The data are of April 23.
If i am right, that's bad news because
I came up with this theory almost a month ago. Since then i have been looking for at least one scientific paper that supports it. So far: zero! I submitted it as a question to a Stanford panel but they didn't use it, maybe because they thought it was a stupid question. So take it for what it is: a wild guess. P.S. A more attentive reader than me has spotted this paper under review of April 14 about a study conducted by Li Lanjuan's team at Zhejiang University, according to which the coronavirus is mutating much faster than we knew and mutations affect its deadliness ( a summary here). I also discovered a study by Linfa Wang's team at Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore suggesting that the Singapore lineage may make it less dangerous (paper). Two weeks after i published this article, a study by Bette Korber's team at Los Alamos National Laboratory argued that a new more contagious strain appeared in February in Europe and migrated to the East Coast of the USA and became dominant worldwide since mid-March. Of course this is just a tentative conclusion, as this article points out but by July 2020 Korber published another study proving that the new mutation G614 had almost completely replaced the first European mutation D614 and it was more infectious. In November 2020 two studies showed that the variant called 614G, the one that became prevalent in Europe and then in the rest of the world, spreads more quickly than the original Wuhan variant: a study by University of North Carolina showed that the 614G variant "exhibits more efficient infection, replication, and competitive fitness" than the original Wuhan virus (paper) and a study by Imperial College London shows that clusters of 614G infections grow faster than infections from the original Wuhan virus (paper). If a mutation caused much of the disaster of 2020, then this was one more reason to enact early on lockdowns, facemasks and social distancing: the mutation did not spread in the countries that did so. Back to the world news | Top of this page Back to the world news |
Email | Back to History | Back to the world news | Home | Support this website TM, ®, Copyright © 2020 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved. |