Everybody Chill the F*ck Out About These COVID-19 Mutations

There’s a lot of bad reporting about the novel coronavirus, the way it mutates, and the implications of those mutations.

Despite what The New York Post claimed, there is no sign SARS-CoV-2 is mutating to become less dangerous.

And despite what The Los Angeles Times reported, there’s scant evidence the virus is mutating to become more dangerous. (The Atlantic published a great rebuttal.)

“Media coverage does not always reflect what scientists actually say,” tweeted Bill Hanage, a professor at Harvard’s school of public health.

Let’s be clear. The novel coronavirus is deadly. It’s more contagious than the flu and more lethal. There’s no vaccine yet and there might never be. It’s not even clear that a vaccine would work.

Like all viruses, SARS-CoV-2 changes over time. But those changes don’t really make it any less, or more, lethal. Even as its RNA evolves, it’s still the novel coronavirus. And it can still make you very sick.

On May 5, however, The New York Post claimed the virus might be losing strength. “A new coronavirus mutation discovered by Arizona researchers mirrors a change that occurred as the 2003 SARS virus began to weaken,” the Post announced, citing the researchers’ May 1 paper in the Journal of Virology.

The Post’s story—and the story’s headline, in particular—implied SARS-CoV-2 might mutate itself into a less dangerous form owing to accumulating “deletions,” or gaps, in its genetic code.

The public health implications aren’t hard to see. If a virus weakens all on its own, what use are business shutdowns and social-distancing rules?

But the Post is wrong, Matthew Scotch, one of the authors of the Journal of Virology study, told The Daily Beast. In tracking deletions in SARS-CoV-2, the Arizona team wasn’t saying the virus is losing lethality, said Scotch, a scientist at Arizona State University. Quite the contrary.

“The takeaway is that one virus had a large deletion which demonstrates that it is possible for the virus to transmit without having complete portions of its genetic material,” Scotch explained. “This was one virus and we do not suggest that this means a ‘weakening’ of any kind.”

Besides, Scotch added, gradual changes inside the novel coronavirus’s genetic code don’t have a lot of bearing on how deadly it is. “With SARS-CoV-2, differences in clinical outcomes are more about individual immune response and co-morbidities rather than the differences in the genomics of the virus,” Scotch said.

The Los Angeles Times made similar mistakes, albeit to the opposite effect. The L.A. newspaper read too much into a single study and more or less concluded that the novel coronavirus was evolving into something much more dangerous. 

The Times’ May 5 story summarizes a paper by a team of New Mexico scientists that appeared online on April 30. “Scientists have identified a new strain of the coronavirus that has become dominant worldwide and appears to be more contagious than the versions that spread in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic,” the Times claimed.

The newspaper’s story accurately reflects the New Mexico study’s conclusion. But the reporting doesn’t stress enough that the study hasn’t been formally peer-reviewed—and that informal reviews from outside experts have not been kind.

The study’s findings are “overblown,” Lisa Gralinski, a University of North Carolina virologist, told The Atlantic.

David Morrison, a biologist at Uppsala University in Sweden, echoed Gralinski’s assessment in comments to The Daily Beast. “The conclusion that the new variant is more virulent seems to be based on the idea that it becomes the dominant strain in any population,” Morrison said.

“If this is so, then we still have only one main variant to deal with,” Morrison added. “Indeed, if this variant has been around since February, as the initial report claims, then most infected people must have it. The only people who wouldn’t have this one would be the very earliest cases.”

In other words, the “new” strain of SARS-CoV-2 that the Los Alamos paper and The Los Angeles Times described… isn’t actually new at all. It’s the version of the novel coronavirus that most people have and which governments, scientists and medical personnel all over the world have been battling for months.

Morrison more or less repeated what Scotch said. Our immune responses—that is to say, our own DNA—matter more in our fight against the novel-coronavirus than does the virus’s own RNA, highly mutated or otherwise. 

But not enough reporting takes into account that likelihood.

Nathan Grubaugh, a Yale geneticist, was unsparing in his assessment of recent reporting on changes in SARS-CoV-2. “Media (with a few exceptions) should be forbidden to write about mutations,” Grubaugh tweeted jokingly.