[News] A compromised immune system could facilitate SARS-CoV-2 virus mutations

[#Steeven.™]

Maintaining a strengthened immune system is one of the aspects that must be taken into account during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as maintaining biosecurity measures and physical distance.

In the last month, the appearance of new mutations of the SARS-CoV-2 virus have been reported, such as the one identified in the United Kingdom that would have a higher transmissibility than the initially reported cases.

Precisely one of the hypotheses that are maintained about the origin of this mutation was that an immunosuppressed patient had a long-term infection. Faced with this situation, the virus had to adapt to its body and mutate.

However, this origin has not yet been established by the researchers and probably cannot be determined because to identify the changes that a virus has it is necessary to perform genomic sequencing, which is not done in all tests.

The ABC portal compiled testimonies from scientists as well as an article in the journal Science that hypothesize that people who have a weaker immune response and become infected with the virus can keep it in the body for longer.

The president of the Spanish Society of Immunology (SEI), Marcos López, explained to that medium that to survive in the host the virus can mutate to increase its infectivity, but it could lose lethality.

There are still several questions that specialists have not been able to determine, one of them is whether the variant can increase the mortality of those infected, which according to the first reports would not be the case, nor the severity of the symptoms.

They also investigate which people can prolong an infection, since it has not yet been proven that this situation occurs in all those who are immunosuppressed.