Several scientists have spoken of a mutation in the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, called D614G, which has been growing in parts of the world such as Europe, North America and Asia, having a contagion rate 10 times higher than the first strain.
The general director of health in Malaysia, Noor Hisham Abdullah, warned that there should be greater public vigilance, since the level of contagion is extremely high and the vaccines that are being developed may not be effective against this mutation.
However, the increase in this strain has coincided with a lower mortality rate, which could indicate that it is a less dangerous mutation.
"Perhaps it is a good thing to have a virus that is more contagious but less deadly," Paul Tambyah, president of the International Society for Infectious Diseases, told Reuters news agency .
Several experts have stated that this mutation appears to be the most dominant in the world, as the speed at which it spreads is very high.
Professor Nick Loman, from the University of Birmingham, told the Daily Mirror site that this strain spread much faster in the world than the first one that appeared in Wuhan, China, and apparently it is not as deadly.
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The reason this would happen is because, as shown above, when a virus mutates it tends to be less virulent.
"The virus is interested in infecting more people, but not killing them because a virus depends on the host for food and shelter," Tambyah told Reuters .
Scientists discovered the D614G mutation last February, and the World Health Organization noted at the time that there was no evidence that this strain caused more severe disease.
On Noor Hisham's concern that this mutation could affect the development of the coronavirus vaccine, Tambyah and Sebastian Maurer-Stroh noted that the variation is not large enough to have that effect.
"The variants are almost identical and they didn't change areas that our immune systems normally recognize, so there shouldn't be any difference for the vaccines that are being developed," Maurer-Stroh said.
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