No Need to Worry About the Coronavirus Mutating
Worried that the coronavirus may mutate and become even more dangerous and destructive are understandable — but mostly unwarranted. It’s true that viruses do mutate as they spread across the world over time.
And it is also correct that those mutations have the potential to give viruses new, harmful, traits. But fortunately, the likelihood of that actually occurring is extremely low, according to science.
Pop culture did a bad job of describing mutation in a virus by over-blowing the outcomes. In the 2003 post-apocalyptic horror film 28 Days Later, a “mutated” Ebola virus wreaks destruction on society. In reality,
mutation “is a common aspect of life for an RNA virus,” writes Nathan D. Grubaugh, assistant professor in the Department of Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases at the Yale Institute for Global Health, in a letter in the Nature Microbiology in February.
SARS-CoV-2 is held as an RNA virus because its genetic material is RNA, not DNA. He is urging both scientists and the general public not to think about the potential outcomes of mutation.
Mis-information, he says in an article for CNN, may “turn out to be as costly as the disease.”
“It probably wouldn’t change anything at all because by the time we can confirm what any particular mutation is doing, the pandemic will likely be over.”
To understand why you shouldn’t worry about it, look at how mutations happen in the first place. Every time any virus self-replicates,
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it first has to make a copy of its genome. The method it uses to make those copies, however — an enzyme called RNA polymerase — usually makes errors during the copying process.
The resulting copy of the viruses tends to contain the random typos, which we know as mutations. But not all mutations have a significant effect on the virus and the course of a pandemic.
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