Virus with D614G change in Spike out-competes original strain, but may not make patients sicker

The SARS-CoV-2 virus has a low mutation rate overall (much lower than the viruses that cause influenza and HIV-AIDS). The D614G variant appears as part of a set of four linked mutations that appear to have arisen once and then moved together around the world as a consistent set of variations.

“It’s remarkable to me,” commented Will Fischer of Los Alamos, an author on the study, “both that this increase in infectivity was detected by careful observation of sequence data alone, and that our experimental colleagues could confirm it with live virus in such a short time.”

Fortunately, “the clinical data in this paper from Sheffield showed that even though patients with the new G virus carried more copies of the virus than patients infected with D, there wasn’t a corresponding increase in the severity of illness,” said Saphire, who leads the Gates Foundation-supported Coronavirus Immunotherapy Consortium (CoVIC).

via Los Alamos National Laboratory | Duke University | University of Sheffield |