Another article on the two strains..

Thanks to Mike..

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It’s official, the COVID-19 virus has mutated into two strain that is 1,000 more infectious.

To date, at least 94,000 people have been infected around the world with COVID-19 and almost 3,200 have died, while 50,000 have recovered from the disease. But those numbers could change in the coming weeks. Researchers say there are now two types of the coronavirus infecting people and 70% of those infected have caught the more aggressive form.

Published this week, a study from Nankai University in Tianjin lead by Professor Ruan Jishou, discovered that the new SARS-Cov-2 coronavirus that causes the COVID-19 disease has a mutated gene that is found in the HIV virus. As a result, the study found two distinct versions of the virus which they named L and S.

L Strain – The more aggressive and faster-spreading stain compare to its milder counterpart, S. This strain is responsible for around 70% of infected patients. Due to its aggressive nature, it has become less common as the outbreak has gone on, with it apparently struggling to spread since early January. The L strain surged at the beginning of the outbreak and made people so ill, those who caught it were quickly diagnosed and isolated. This isolation have it less opportunity to spread widely. Experts suggest the ‘human intervention’ and lock down of areas where it was spreading fast is controlling the transmission rate, and hopefully leading to this virus strain to burn itself out.

S Strain – This milder strain, is less severe but people will carry it for longer before ending up in hospital thus causing the more infection. From an evolutionary standpoint, this strain is winning out compared to its more aggressive form.

Jishou states, “This finding suggests that 2019-nCoV coronavirus may be significantly different from the SARS coronavirus in the infection pathway and has the added potency of using the packing mechanisms of other viruses such as HIV.”

How coronavirus infects the human body is it attaches to human cells by deceiving an enzyme which can make it ‘fuse’ to proteins inside the body and cause the infection Typically, a virus uses the outreaching spike protein to hook on to the host cell, but normally this protein is inactive. The findings of the study reveal that the mutation can generate a structure known as a cleavage site (similar to those in HIV and Ebola) in the new coronavirus’ spike protein. The cleavage site structure’s role is to trick the human furin protein, so it will cut and activate the spike protein and cause a “direct fusion” of the viral and cellular membranes.

“The combined findings from the three studies indicate that because of the HIV-like mutations, its ability to bind with human cells could be as much as 1,000 times more potent than the initial SARS virus of 2003.

The findings also indicate that the new SARS-CoV-2 has a ‘dual attack’ approach of binding to human cells.

The first is via the ACE2 receptors found on human cell membranes and it’s a typical mode of most coronaviruses. (The new SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus has a plus 80 percent genomic matching to the previous SARS virus, hence it explains this property that it possesses)

However it must be noted that the ACE2 protein does not occur in large quantities in healthy people, and this partly helped to limit the scale of the SARS outbreak of 2002/2003 which infected close to 8,000 people globally.

As the findings of the new study indicates that the new SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus has a mutated gene similarly found on the HIV virus, it is also able to attack human cells via the target called furin, which is an enzyme that works as a protein activator in the human body. Typically many proteins are inactive or dormant when they are produced and have to be “cut” at specific points to activate their various functions which furin does in the human cellular pathways.