What is a COVID-19 variant and what do they mean for the community?
ABC15 Health Insider explains threats posed by COVID-19 variants.
and last updated 2021-02-26 00:52:48-05
Before we begin to talk about coronavirus variants and why they pose such a threat, we first must understand how variants are formed.
To learn more, we turned to our ABC15 Health Insider, TGEN epidemiologist Dr. David Engelthaler. A virus is essentially like all living things. It evolves in a way that it picks up mutations, says Dr. Engelthaler. Once it replicates, it has to replicate that entire genome and the genome of the virus is 30,000 letters long. and so it has to replicate all those over and over and it s going to make mistakes. And it does have the ability to correct some of those mistakes, but sometimes, it doesn t. And those mistakes can act just like typos. Most of those are just typos. They don t really change the make-up of the virus at all. They don t cause any harm, don t make it more viru