‘NEW STRAIN OF VIRUS IS MORE CONTAGIOUS’

WASHINGTON: US researchers said on Tuesday that the coronavirus, which originated in Wuhan, China, has mutated and is now more contagious. The new strain which is now sweeping through America can jeopardise the hunt for a vaccine, they warned.

After the outbreak in China, the virus spread across Europe and then hit the US and Canada, and it has been a dominant strain worldwide since March, according to researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the US. They published their findings in a paper in BioRxiv, a scientific journal that brings out pre-peer reviewed papers.

If Covid-19 does not subside in summer, it could further mutate and could potentially be less effective to vaccines that are being developed, the researchers said. “This is hard news,” Bette Korber, a computational biologist at Los Alamos and lead author of the study, wrote on her Facebook page, as reported by Los Angeles Times. “But please don’t only be disheartened by it.”

The disease has killed over 72,000 people in the US, up by 1,240 in the last 24 hours. HTC