Experts dispute reports that coronavirus is becoming less lethal - The Washington Post

Has the novel coronavirus in Italy changed in some significant way?

The pandemic is evolving rapidly, with the rate of new cases declining in some hard-hit areas of the world, including northern Italy and New York City, while rising dramatically in Brazil, Peru and India.

Vaughn Cooper, an infectious-disease expert at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, said the new coronavirus mutates slowly compared with influenza and other microbes, and its genetic changes appear to be “mostly inconsequential.”.

“I believe it’s safe to say that the differences that doctors are reporting in Italy are entirely due to changes to medical treatment and in human behavior, which limit transmission and numbers of new infections initiated by large inocula — a larger dose of virus appears to be worse — rather than changes in the virus itself,” he said.

“The virus hasn’t lost function on the time scale of two months,” said Andrew Noymer, an epidemiologist at the University of California at Irvine.

In the United States, the pandemic has taken on a patchwork pattern, with much of the Northeast seeing marked improvement.

Researchers Harm van Bakel, Emilia Sordillo and Viviana Simon at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, who have been focusing on the genetics of the novel coronavirus, said in an interview that they had not seen a dip in viral load among patients in that hospital system since March, nor have they detected any major genetic changes in the virus in New York City.

People in the United States are collectively holding their breath, meanwhile, to see if there is an uptick in cases in response to the reopening of the economy, public gatherings over the Memorial Day holiday weekend and the eruption of protests against police violence in cities in recent days.

“I think we will continue to see explosive outbreaks connected to institutions,” Rivers said?

“An outbreak starts at an institution, then it starts to move into the community,” Rivers said.

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