Recovered virus patients retest positive due to 'dead' virus fragments: experts

Re:Recovered virus patients retest positive due to 'dead' vi... by f38zf5vdt on Wednesday April 29, 2020 @04:27PM (#23023834)

One of the currently popular mutants of the virus has a mutation in the proof-reading exonuclease that causes the virus to mutate much more often than the original strain.

https://translational-medicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10...

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Re:Recovered virus patients retest positive due to 'dead' vi... by timr on Wednesday April 29, 2020 @04:33PM (#23023905)

"that causes the virus to mutate much more often than the original strain."

This is not claimed anywhere in the paper you linked to. They show a non-synonymous mutation in RNA-dependent RNA polymerase, and hypothesized that it could impact drug resistance.

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Re:Recovered virus patients retest positive due to 'dead' vi... by f38zf5vdt on Wednesday April 29, 2020 @04:43PM (#23024031)

My bad, I was misremembering the paper, which mentions the exonuclease's role in fidelity. I meant RdRps. The conclusion was the same. Figure 4 shows quite clearly that the RdRp mutation is associated with further mutations.

> We found that viral strains with RdRp mutation have a median of 3 point mutations [range: 2–5], whereas viral strains with no RdRp mutation have a median of 1 mutation [range: 0–3] (p value < 0.001, Mann–Whitney test). The different distribution between the two groups relative to the number of mutations is statistically significant (Fig. 4).

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