Not a single day goes by without some kind of bad news from the nation’s top infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci. In an interview with The Journal of the American Medical Association (AMA), Dr. Fauci said the coronavirus has mutated in a way that might help the pathogen spread more easily. The potential mutation that Dr. Fauci cited was first reported by investigators at Los Alamos National Laboratory in an article published by the journal Cell earlier Thursday.
“The data is showing there’s a single mutation that makes the virus be able to replicate better and maybe have high viral loads,” Fauci said in an interview with The Journal of the American Medical Association’s Dr. Howard Bauchner. “We don’t have a connection to whether an individual does worse with this or not; it just seems that the virus replicates better and may be more transmissible.”
But as we reported back in April, the findings about coronvirus mutation is nothing new. According to researchers, coronavirus mutates at an average of about two mutations per month. “Mutation. The word naturally conjures fears of unexpected and freakish changes,” researchers wrote in a report published in Nature Microbiology in late February. “Ill-informed discussions of mutations thrive during virus outbreaks,” they continued, which is exactly what we’re seeing with SARS-CoV-2.
There is a consensus among researchers that as coronavirus COVID-19 spreads around the world, it’s normal that there’s going to been an increase in the number of mutations. Many are also predicting that the virus will mutate into something deadlier and become an even scarier threat to humanity.
However, contrary to what Dr. Fauci said, mutations aren’t necessarily a bad thing. “Every virus mutates; it’s part of the virus life cycle. Those shifts and changes aren’t always a big deal. In some cases, those mutations may actually lead to a weaker virus. Usually, though, the changes are so slight that there’s no noticeable difference in the disease’s transmission and fatality rates,” according to analysis from online journal HealthLine
Below is a video of Dr. Fauci’s interview with AMA’s Dr. Howard Bauchner.
