[imajoo]

(I am not a scientist) I remember seeing someone talk about the risk of re-infection when this all started. They said that they only way to fully know if the virus has mutated would be to do a full sequence of the virus comparing the first infection with the second. It will be interesting (and possibly scary if has mutated) to see what is causing this second re-infection of patients that are supposedly recovered.

Here's an article talking about people getting re-infected at the end of Feb. https://www.livescience.com/coronavirus-spread-after-recover...

[mrandish]

> if the virus has mutated

From the article: "The new coronavirus is mutating—but that’s not a bad thing"

* "Just because the virus is mutating doesn’t mean that it’s suddenly going to become more dangerous… the bulk of the mutations that appear as a virus spreads are either harmful to the virus itself (meaning it is less likely to survive or replicate) or don’t change how it functions."

https://www.popsci.com/story/health/covid-19-coronavirus-mut...

From the study: "High incidence of asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection"

* "the hospital length of stay for patients with a large number of transmission chains is shortening, indicated that the toxicity of SARS-CoV-2 may be reducing in the process of transmission.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.16.20037259v...

From the summary post for: "Discovery of a 382-nt deletion during the early evolution of SARS-CoV-2"

* "The researchers sequenced the genome of a number of COVID19 viruses from a series of infected patients from Singapore. They found that the viral genome had a large deletion that was also witnessed in past epidemics of related viruses (MERS, SARS), especially later in the epidemic. The form with the deletion was less infective and has been attributed to the dying out of these past epidemics. In other words, COVID19 seems to be following the same evolutionary trajectory. Discovery of a 382-nt deletion during the early evolution of SARS-CoV-2"

https://www.reddit.com/r/COVID19/comments/fl3yqg/some_sarsco...

[brianpan]

Covid-19 mutates about 2x a month. https://bedford.io/blog/ncov-cryptic-transmission/

This doesn't mean the virus has changed enough for your body to not recognize it. But it can be used to map transmission chains.

We know where Covid-19 started, but scientists have also used mutation rates to correct our understanding of when HIV jumped to humans.

[officialjunk]

We know where it was first identified as a new virus, not where it started.

There are numerous reports of Italy’s search for patient zero pointing to it being there before China.

“ Remuzzi says he is now hearing information about it from general practitioners. "They remember having seen very strange pneumonia, very severe, particularly in old people in December and even November," he says. "This means that the virus was circulating, at least in [the northern region of] Lombardy and before we were aware of this outbreak occurring in China."”

https://www.npr.org/2020/03/19/817974987/every-single-indivi...

[wumms]

Visualized phylogeny of the novel coronavirus: https://nextstrain.org/ncov/global