3 Coronavirus Variants Discovered – Surprisingly, “Type-A” Found In Americans, Wuhan’s Type-B And Type-C In Europe

Scientists were flabbergasted at the speed of Coronavirus spreading to around the world. With cases fast approaching 2-million and more than 100,000 deaths, everyone is asking the same question – when will a Covid-19 vaccine be ready? If you believe Microsoft founder Bill Gates, an effective vaccine is not likely to emerge until another 18 months.

Even if that’s true, there’s another problem. Scientists have discovered that the virus has been mutating at an extraordinary speed. Peter Forster, a geneticist at the University of Cambridge, said – “There are too many rapid mutations to neatly trace a Covid-19 family tree. We used a mathematical network algorithm to visualise all the plausible trees simultaneously.”

At the same University of Cambridge in the UK, researchers also discovered 3 distinct “variants” of Covid-19, consisting of clusters of closely related lineages, which were labelled as “A”, “B” and “C”. The jaw-dropping discovery would not only be useful to produce vaccine, but could certainly help scientists to explain why the Covid-19 is so contagious, as well as to identify its source.

Using genetic network techniques, the scientists analyzed the first 160 complete virus genomes from human patients around the world between 24 December 2019 and 4 March 2020. Together with researchers from Germany, they mapped some of the original spread of the Coronavirus through its mutations, and successfully reconstructed an early “evolutionary paths” of the Covid-19.

As the infection spread from Wuhan to Europe and North America, the paths show how the Coronavirus mutated to “type-A”, “type-B” and “type-C”. “These techniques are mostly known for mapping the movements of prehistoric human populations through DNA. We think this is the first time they have been used to trace the infection routes of a coronavirus like Covid-19,” – said Forster.

Mr. Forster and his team found that “type-A” – supposedly the “original human virus genome” – was closest to the Coronavirus discovered in bats and found in Wuhan, the epicentre of the initial outbreak. But surprisingly, the type-A was not the Chinese city’s predominant virus type. Instead, the most common variant found in Wuhan was “type-B”.

Variant “A”, most closely related to the virus found in both bats and pangolins, is described as “the root of the outbreak” by researchers and scientists. Type “B” is derived from “A”, separated by two mutations, then “C” is in turn a “daughter” of “B”. Type A was found in Americans who had lived in Wuhan, and in other patients diagnosed in the United States and Australia.

Even though Wuhan’s major Coronavirus type was “B” (when it should be “A”), the variant reportedly didn’t travel much beyond the region without further mutations – suggesting that there was some sort of “resistance” against variant “B” of Covid-19 outside East Asia. The variant “C”, meanwhile, is the primary type in Europe, found in early patients from France, Italy, Sweden and England.

The genetic network analysis discovered that while “type-C” is absent from samples in mainland China, they can be seen in Singapore, Hong Kong and South Korea. In the same breath, the research suggests that one of the earliest introductions of the Coronavirus in Italy came via the first documented German infection on January 27.

In that German infection case, an employee of car parts supplier Webasto Group in Munich had contracted the infection from a Chinese colleague. The Shanghai-based Chinese employee, now known as Germany’s Case #0, coincidentally received a visit from her parents from Wuhan before she travelled to Stockdorf, Germany to attend meetings at the Webasto’s HQ.

Last month, a team of Italian scientists believed that Italy’s Coronavirus epidemic might have come to the country via Germany – not directly from China as many experts initially assumed. They matched the Italian genetic sequencing of the pathogen to a case that emerged in Germany in January. Another early Italian infection route was related to a “Singapore cluster”.

Likewise, in Brazil, a group of researchers had isolated SARS-CoV-2 from two patients confirmed to have been infected with Covid-19 and sequenced the complete genomes of both samples of the virus. They found that not only did the genomes differ from each other, but they were also very different from the genomes of the virus samples sequenced in Wuhan, China.

Previously, scientists announced the good news that Covid-19 virus mutates so slowly that when a vaccine is eventually developed, it would be most likely be effective for years, the same way measles or chickenpox vaccine does. In fact, the researchers said the latest Coronavirus is more stable than the flu because the SARS-CoV-2 does not seem to mutate much.

However, based on the latest study done by the UK and Germany scientists using the “Phylogenetic” network analysis, obviously not only is the Covid-19 capable of performing too many rapid mutations, it has also mutated itself into three types of variants for different continents – Asia, America and Europe.

China has been accused of covering up the spread of the virus, not to mention the suggestion that the spread of Coronavirus from China might have originated in bats that the Chinese people consumed before being passed on to humans. But the same bats are also favourite indigenous protein in Indonesia, particularly in North Sulawesi.

More importantly, why Americans who had lived in Wuhan had “type-A” of Covid-19, the root of the outbreak, but most of Chinese infected in Wuhan had the “type-B”, which can’t exist without type “A”? Two thirds (70%) of the 310 virus samples sequenced in the U.S. were type A. Naughty speculations would say this as proof that it was the America who first spread the Coronavirus. - financetwitter

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