Scientists Claim Newly Dominant Strain of Coronavirus Is More Contagious Than Original
Scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory published a study on Thursday that indicates the now-prevalent strain of coronavirus is a more contagious version of the pathogen first reported in Wuhan, China.
The study, which is not yet peer-reviewed, was published on BioRxiv, a website used by medical researchers to speed up collaboration on studies and potential treatments of coronavirus. Scientists at the Los Alamos lab, run by the U.S. Department of Energy, collaborated with researchers at Duke University and the University of Sheffield in England.
The researchers concluded that a mutation of coronavirus that occurred sometime in early February in Europe made the pathogen more contagious, such that the mutated strain rapidly migrated to the East Coast of the U.S. and has been the dominant strain of coronavirus worldwide since March.
Most worldwide research on a vaccine has focused on earlier versions of coronavirus that lack the new mutation, the Los Angeles Times noted. The authors of the Los Alamos study wrote that they felt an “urgent need for an early warning” that the now-dominant strain of coronavirus had mutated, which would compel vaccine developers to study that strain in order to produce effective treatments.
“The story is worrying, as we see a mutated form of the virus very rapidly emerging, and over the month of March becoming the dominant pandemic form,” study leader Bette Korber, a computational biologist at Los Alamos, wrote in a Facebook post. “When viruses with this mutation enter a population, they rapidly begin to take over the local epidemic, thus they are more transmissible.”
Researchers in the U.S. and around the world are racing to find a vaccine for the pathogen, which has infected over 3,600,000 and killed over 250,000 worldwide. The pandemic has caused many of the world’s nations to close businesses and schools, with several, including the U.S., imposing travel restrictions on the entry of foreign citizens.
