SARS-CoV-2 Archives - Omics Help Desk

8Jan '21

COVID-19 vaccines are needed now more than ever. They arrive right on time as UK’s and South Africa’s problematic new strains emerge, B.1.1.7 and 501Y.V2, respectively. The strains have multiple mutations that appear to make the virus more transmissible. Both strains are different but share a mutation – called N501Y – which is in a crucial part of the virus that it uses to infect the body’s cells. The UK strain is now being discovered in many countries around the world.

Many people and also scientists ask themselves:

What happened? Why now?

COVID-19 mutates quickly during infection – What does it mean for us?

patyb

Health

26Mar '20

The image shows a transmission electron microscope image showing the new coronavirus emerging from the surface of human cells. (Image: © NIAID-RML)

A study by Shen et al. published on March 9th 2020, has shown by analyzing the lung microbiota (the microbes in the lung) of people infected with the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, that the virus “evolves in vivo” after infection. “Evolves in vivo” means the virus evolves or mutates inside the body of an infected person during the infection. The virus undergoes a strong immunologic pressure in humans, and may thus accumulate mutations to outmaneuver the immune system. This observation implies that the evolution of the virus may affect its virulence or how it affects a person’s disease progression. This evolution may also affect its infectivity or how quickly the virus can replicate or reproduce itself inside the human body. And it may affect its transmissibility, or how easily the virus can be transmitted to other people.

It is not clear if or how this mutated virus is spread in the population, but the article recommends to strengthen the surveillance of the viral evolution in the population.

In conclusion, this small but significant study of 8 SARS-CoV-2 patients, makes many critical observations related to the quick evolution of the virus, but it suggests that more research is needed to understand what it means for us.

Coronavirus Web Site Visualizations with Stats

patyb

Health

23Mar '20

Figure shows a screenshot of the Genomic epidemiology of novel coronavirus. Maintained by the Nextstrain team. Enabled by data from GISAID. Showing 955 of 955 genomes sampled between Dec 2019 and Mar 2020.

Earlier we shared a Coronavirus vs Influenza Table listing the differences between the coronavirus and the flu. The numbers in the table are updated continuously as new data is reported by reputable organizations such as the World Health organization (WHO) and Center for Disease Control (CDC) of countries that are funding and managing them well. Here we offer a list of the most informative, most helpful, and best-designed online visualizations of the coronavirus pandemic.

Latest List Update: December 6 2020

These Coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 web sites offer different types of statistics and visualizations:

Omics Help Desk