Metro. The Scottish
Daily Recordwent with the similarly disconcerting “Super Covid alert”. Is this the time to panic? The headlines referred to the Health Secretary Matt Hancock’s revelation in the House of Commons on Monday that a mutated strain of Sars-CoV-2 had been identified in the south east of England, and that it is spreading faster than previous strains. Hancock didn’t give many details – in fact, most immunologists and virologists were blindsided, scrambling to work out which particular strain he was referring to. Only later that evening did scientists at Ravindra Gupta’s lab in Cambridge post the preprint paper, which described the strain, online. The Covid Genomics UK Consortium also confirmed it had been tracking this new strain.
Summary: mutations happen, if overall rates are up then prevalence of mutations will rise too:
Some background - like all viruses SARS-CoV-2 encodes its information in a nucleic acid, in SARS s case, RNA. This is simply a very long polymer made from 4 chemical subunits; the long form of these chemicals are too tedious to write down, so we give the 4 letters - A,C, U + G Ewan Birney (@ewanbirney) December 14, 2020 Hard to escape the conclusion the government are leading on this to cover for their wider failings over the Autumn,
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