From New Atlas, October 9:
Over the last couple of months researchers tracking emerging SARS-CoV-2 variants have started noticing something strange. No one new variant has looked like taking over but instead a variety of different subvariants seemed to be accumulating the same mutations.
These mutations all seemed to be converging in a way to evade our pre-existing immunity, and a striking study recently appeared speculating the virus has the potential to completely escape our current immune responses. As many people around the world return to normality, deeming the pandemic over, these new evolutionary signals suggest we may be done with thinking about COVID but SARS-CoV-2 is most certainly not done with us …
The Twitter TrackersTwitter has been described by some as a town-square, analogous to a massive open space where anyone can offer their two cents on anything. But in practice it’s actually nothing like that. A more apt analogy would be Twitter resembles a massive apartment building filled with countless rooms devoted to conversations between people with shared interests or beliefs.Inside one small room in the gargantuan Twitter high rise resides a diverse assortment of virologists, infectious disease researchers, epidemiologists, data visualization nerds, and ambitious armchair experts. They all focus on one particular subject – tracking the genetic mutations of SARS-CoV-2.
Wading into the world of Variant Tracking Twitter can be dizzying for the uninitiated. A whirlwind of dense terminology accompany tweets filled with graphs tracking coded mutations and increasingly complicated variant names. Pango lineages, GISAID data, Nextstrain clades.
In September a word started popping up frequently amongst the coded conversations citing RBD mutations in K444T and N460K. That word was "convergence."....
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