Extraordinary Patient Offers Surprising Clues To Origins Of Coronavirus Variants

[Islander]

Michaeleen Doucleff
February 5, 2021

Back in the spring of last year, a 45-year-old man went to the Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston because of a coronavirus infection. Doctors treated him with steroids and discharged him five days later.
But the infection never went away — for 154 days....

The sequences showed Li and his team that the virus was changing very quickly inside the man's body. The virus wasn't picking up just one or two mutations at a time. But rather, it acquired a whole cluster of more than 20 mutations. Scientists had never seen SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes the disease COVID-19, mutate so quickly during the whole pandemic.

Keep reading: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsan...5v35611F1xOwE0

[Pattypans]

It kind of makes you wonder if the vaccines will be effective against the variants. (I don't even know if they're effective against the original, but that's another topic.)

[Islander]

Several of us have been doing ongoing research and sharing our findings. The most recent well informed source overhead claims that our many questions won't be fully answered until the year 2023. Questions like...

• how effective is it? What do we mean by effective? Will it protect you from getting the coronavirus? (no, but it will make symptoms milder)
• Will I still be contagious after having been vaccinated? Can I shed the virus? (yes to both)
• how does it actually work inside the cell? Does it even penetrate the cell? (I've heard yes & no)
• how well will it protect us from the new variants that keep mutating?
• how long will its protection last? Will we need a booster every year?
• does effectiveness decline with age? (some sayit's useless after 80)
• what adverse effects should we expect? Right now the Astrazeneca vaccine appears to be causing blood clots...
... And so much more.

[BandsAiud]

That's why I'm still thinking twice of taking any vaccines, new variants can still be a threat to those who got vaccinated, keeping myself in isolation as possible is the only thing that I can do right now that that makes sense.