Quote:
Originally Posted by lewdog
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I know that's a scary headline, but people need to calm down a little bit about this.
Mutations are not strains in and of themselves. There are all types of mutations, called missense mutations, that can occur in an organism that result in no functional change. If you were to sample any person with a viral or bacterial infection, you are not going to find genetic uniformity within the pathogen.
Also, since you are not transmitting all of the virus to someone through a few respiratory droplets, the virus itself undergoes genetic bottlenecking during every transmission. This actually happened to cheetahs several thousand years ago, which is why they have less genetic diversity than other big cats.
Their study, which again has not been subject to peer review, does states that mutations have the possibility to affect pathogenicity of the virus, but this is true of every virus.