Treedbear
Veteran Member
- Joined
- May 30, 2016
- Messages
- 2,567
- Location
- out on a limb
- Basic Beliefs
- secular, humanist, agnostic on theism/atheism
At this stage, a vaccine for this virus is just a pipe dream!
If there's no vaccine then masks will probably become permanent.
I doubt it. But flu viruses have this nasty habit of mutating. This novel Chinese virus is no exception.
Except that although influenza is an RNA virus, this:
But RNA replication typically lacks the error-correction mechanisms cells employ when copying DNA, so RNA viruses make mistakes during replication. Coronaviruses have the longest genomes of any RNA virus—consisting of 30,000 letters, or bases—and the more material a pathogen copies, the more opportunity there is for mistakes. The upshot is that these viruses mutate very rapidly. Some of these mutations may confer new properties, such as the ability to infect new cell types—or even new species.