Thank you coffeeandcroissant for the heads up on the new variant identified in Manaus, Brazil.
By the way, there is also talk about one in Japan but the experts are still in discussion, it seems it may have arisen from the Brazilian strain, will come back to that later.
It is worrying, but not necessarily surprising, that yet another variant (one with a lot of new, advantageous mutations) has popped up.
I’ve read the paper and a really concerning thing for me is that it shares many of the same mutations as that seen in the U.K.-identified and the S.A.-identified variants.
These have all arisen completely independently, which increasingly suggests something called convergent evolution.
The worry is that the virus is finding ways to be more effective. Even completely independently, it arrives at a similar solution. So those mutations are not at random but due to evolutionary pressure. This means more and more of these will occur.
Saw a nice layman’s explanation now on Twitter of convergent evolution from Bill Hanange
“ Think bats and birds and their wings for an eg of far more distantly related things coming to a similar solution. ”
Personally, this is a bit too bloody quick for my liking. Three in the last month. Like the U.K., Brazil has a great sequencing capability so it’s unsurprising that it has been picked up there.
There will be many other variants we don’t know about across the world.
We are going to need a bigger boat.