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I was responding to this from your blog post:

> This data suggests a simple and testable hypothesis – there are natural strains of SARS-CoV-2 in the world that have mutated to be non-pathogenic (asymptomatic), but are still infective and will provide immunity to the more pathogenic (deadly) strains.

From the structure of the post it sounded like "this data" referred to Iceland plus the Wuhan study.

If you only meant the Wuhan study then apologies for misunderstanding.



Yes both. The Icelandic data suggests there is genetic diversity in SARS-CoV-2 and the Wuhan data suggests there are strains that are less pathogenic.

There is also a Singapore study that has identified strains with large gene deletions, but I haven’t yet updated the post to include it [0].

0. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.11.987222v1....


Here’s a post from late February that enumerates 42 known strains of 2019-nCoV as a phylogenetic tree: https://nextstrain.org/narratives/ncov/sit-rep/2020-01-30?n=...

I’m a lay person here, but it seems a foregone conclusion that viruses experience frequent mutation, and that a novel virus infecting a new host species for the first time is going to see a relative explosion in mutations due to the extreme increase in the number of opportunities for it to occur.




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