A single line often inverts meaning once you see what it
answers, so neighbouring messages are always shown.
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As for chronic infection - I can totally believe that. Here's a case we recently picked up - seven month of SARS2 infection with negative PCRs in-between. Sky high titers when picked up in late October (6 months after infection -he remained positive into December). [shared file(s): fake-reinfection.pdf]
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I am normally fairly relaxed about RBD mutations - sure they happen and they may have antigenic effects but we can be pretty sure that they are not being antigenically selected for because there isn't enough standing immunity (inmost places) or vaccination yet. BUT... this chronic infection scenario worries me because it may well have selected for escape from the immune response raised by the wild type virus (and thus the vaccine). And now it is circulating widely.
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This is the set of mutations that are unique to this cluster: [shared file(s): image.png]
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Yes, agreed. Although reinfections also a concern here - I'm worried about selection in e.g., healthcare settings.Mink transmission also a concern here.My default is always "probably not an issue", but SARS2 really does appear to be pretty 'adaptable' and there's ALOT of transmission going on.
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2020-12-14 09:44
Andrew Rambaut
Here is the tree... [shared file(s): Kent_N501Y_836.ml_annotated_collapsed_tree.pdf]
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That's A LOT of mutations - all in one 'jump'?
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There is one intermediate with some of the mutations... hence thought of a chronic shedder
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Yeah, the spike mutations would suggest chronic - but a lot of mutations outside spike too, which is a little peculiar tome.
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Chronic shedding with immune selection definitely a possibility. N501 is next to a short disordered region in S structures - a clear signal that it's an epitope.