Strain-ology Friday: Stains Super and Sub of #COVID-19

A story deep inside the front section caught my eye late last night, titled "South Bay cases tied to China strain?" The COVID-19 virus mutates more slowly than other viruses, but does mutate about three times per month. As it travels from human to human it has opportunity to mutate again. The strain that traveled through Washington state early this year intersected enough people that its multiple mutation result bears its own fingerprint. Let's call this strain "COVID-19W" for the Washington state superstrain. This year's early COVID-19 victims in Santa Clara, California, however, did not bear those mutations, and therefore their infections were imported straight from the Wuhan, China superstrain, which I'll call "COVID-19WC" for this blog post.

While COVID-19 is far too widespread to contain now, the substrains of those and other superstrains can be identified or "traced" and contained. Containment is possible. In fact, Dr. Charles Chiiu, Diretor of the UCSF-Abbott Viral Diagnostics and Discover Center said "his laboratory sequenced four or five strains from samples collected in Santa Clara County in early March and found two strains that caused small clusters, but now appear to have been successfully isolated and controlled."

Let's add more to this Friday post. Strain talk makes the phase-in of the "suppression" stage, which follows an outbreak "surge" stage, official. The Hill reports that 30 strains have been identified by China epidemiologists. A strain in Europe, let's call it "COVID-19E" is much more deadly than other strains in the western U.S. And many New Yorkers affected by COVID-19 appear to carry a strain imported from western Europe:

Researchers infected cells with COVID-19 strains carrying different variations. The most aggressive strains were found to generate as much as 270 times as much viral load as the weakest strains and killed human cells the fastest, according to the study.

The South China Morning Post reports the deadliest mutations found in patients in the study had also been found in a significant portion of patients across Europe, while milder strains were predominant in western parts of the U.S., such as Washington state. A separate study found strains in New York had been imported from Europe. The death rate in New York was similar to that in many European countries.

Let's get reporters to tell us soon what the names of these 30 strains are. Because a sub-strain of a super-strain is something a lay person can wrap his head around. And when he can do that, he can have hope.

General Strain Box Score, COVID-19, Friday April 24, 2020

COVID-19WC (Wuhan, China):  This strain with few mutations resulted in four to five substrains that doctors traced from victims in Santa Clara, California (source: sfchronicle.com).

COVID-19W (Washington state):  A mild strain, traced from passengers on the Princess cruise ship that docked in California in March (sfchronicle.com).

COVID-19E (Europe):  A deadlier strain found to generate 270x the viral load of other strains. Traced from a large portion of European victims and many in New York state (thehill.com).

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Further Reading:

South Bay cases tied to China strain?:   sfchronicle.com  📰

"The South China Morning Post reports the deadliest mutations found in patients in the study had also been found in a significant portion of patients across Europe, while milder strains were predominant in western parts of the U.S., such as Washington state."  thehill.com

"More than half of the existing test sites said in a state survey that their biggest roadblock to expansion is that they lack enough swabs, which are used to collect nasal and throat specimens."  sfchronicle.com  📰





This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.